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Omnibus Response to Various Issues Raised by My Post on a Dessicated Conception of Property Rights

The comment thread under my original post has broached a variety of subjects, and touched upon many implications, actual, potential, or imagined, following from the arguments sketched therein. Rather than attempt to respond to each one these in the original thread, leaving the matter of the responses' connections to the original queries ambiguous - who raised this issue?, to what is this a response? - and thus cluttering up the thread, I thought it preferable to group them together in a new thread, where they might better be clarified.

The question of nature of the currency, and of its backing, has arisen. It is beyond all caviling that the monetary policies of the Greenspan Fed provided a crucial material cause for the development of the financial bubble, and thus, the subsequent collapse. The broad recognition of this reality has precipitated a renewed interest, if only on the right, in the gold standard particularly, and perhaps also in more complicated currency systems backed by a combination of precious metals. I'm not entirely unsympathetic to the interest, but though I am unreservedly critical of the role of monetary policy in the generation of the crisis - and of the attendant manipulations of fundamental economic data concerning inflation and unemployment - it does not appear to me that the gold standard, or any other hypothetical metallic-based currency system, suffices either to preclude the ruinous cycles of boom and bust characteristic of modern capitalistic economies, or to preclude the possibility of deleterious consequences proceeding directly from the monetary system itself. The historical record of the gold standard in the nineteenth century was rather dismal, if one is concerned to have some sort of monetary prophylaxis against cycles of bubble and bust. Moreover, the relative fixity of the quantity of currency under a metallic standard renders rather difficult the entrepreneurial function, inasmuch as, if one posits a relatively static money supply and and expanding cycle of trade - which the entrepreneur must - then it follows that prices must decline as the economy expands. This is, to say the least, a confusing sort of economic signaling; few entrepreneurs will be willing to invest in the expectation of.... falling revenues, profits, and income. Now, of course, businesses were routinely started under the gold standard, but that merely leads into the second difficulty engendered by the relative fixity of the monetary base under a metallic standard. If the supply of money is static, or relatively fixed, in the sense that it expands slowly and fitfully, with new discoveries of specie, or new acquisitions by a central bank, and the economy is assumed to expand for a time, then it follows of necessity that the relative value of existing debts increases, and that this increase is highly correlated with falling prices. Apologetics for the gold standard often emphasize this latter aspect of the system, and, in my estimation, practice a bit of evasion with regard to the former, for it is the former aspect that proved to be the achilles' heel of the system in operation, as the periods of expansion would result in the appreciation of existing debts, a process which sooner or later become utterly unsustainable. This intrinsic feature of the gold standard served as a contributing material cause of the political ferment of the late nineteenth century, particularly among farmers, who found the real value of their debts appreciating more or less simultaneously with the collapse of agricultural commodity prices. Bankrupted by debts impossible to discharge, their properties would be foreclosed upon - and this raises the final, insuperable problem with the gold standard: it is regressively redistributive, effectively, over the cycle of expansion and contraction, redistributing wealth - often real and tangible, as opposed to merely notional - from its possessors, often smallholders and small businessmen, to those who had the good fortune to possess capital to lend at t1. Given that one of the preconditions of our present financial crisis was, shall we say, an insufficiency of resources among the broad middle of the economic spectrum, owing to politico-economic trends of the past two generations, and given, moreover, that any durable solution to our economic predicament must result - at least in the medium term and beyond - in both a rising median income and greater income stability among the middle classes, a monetary system which features regressive redistribution is a non-starter.

This is not to argue, however, that our present financial apparatus is at all ideal. We have already remarked in passing upon its complicity in the creation of the crisis. What tends to go unremarked is that an inflationary system, or at least a monetary system which permits inflation to expand beyond the rate of economic growth, is also regressively redistributive, albeit in a manner altogether subtler, and thus less likely to arouse popular discontent. As the expansion of the monetary base devalues the currency, raising nominal prices, it might be assumed that the effects are uniform and global; but this would be a mistake. There are always sticky factors such as wages and compensation, that might not adjust to the inflation in a linear manner. The additional monetary supply, in essence, must enter the economy in some locations or sectors before others, such that these points will experience inflation before others. And an expanded monetary supply, essentially, enters circulation through certain actors and institutions. In the case of the United States, any increase in the monetary base is passed from the Fed and Treasury through innumerable government programs and the largest financial institutions, meaning that the government and the major banks have the opportunity to spend and/or invest these notional values before the inflationary effects have ramified throughout the economy as a whole; in effect, these entities have the opportunity to purchase goods, services, influence, etc. with the pre-devalued currency, even though the very act of purchase effectively initiates the devaluation. Hence, the hidden tax. But it is also a redistribution. In an era in which both government and the great banking concerns are waxing ever stronger, debauching the economic system and degrading the republican qualities of our political system, transforming the Republic into a mere notion, and leaving in its place a grotesque, hybridized plutocracy, we can scarcely afford a monetary policy resulting in a rate of inflation excessive relative to actual economic growth. I leave it to the reader to infer what sort of monetary policy is, in my estimation, the worst conceivable, save for all the others.

Additionally, the propriety of singling out, first, housing generally, and, second, suburban development specifically, when the entire economy could be characterized as penetrated and conditioned by government in innumerable ways, has been questioned. To this, what response can one offer but that the financial crisis had its origins in a real estate bubble, itself facilitated by lax monetary policy and a legion of occult financial instruments? More specifically, the bubble had a peculiarly suburban character, at least on its residential side; while commercial real estate has also experienced a bust on the suburban side, many upside-down commercial properties are also in urban areas. As regards the latter, I should state that the implication of my original post, which apparently went unremarked, is that, already having a gross surfeit of commercial real estate, it is a colossal misallocation of resources to be building more of it, especially given that much commercial development is, as originally indicated, transitory and predatory, and eschews the utilization of perfectly serviceable existing facilities. As regards the former, suffice it to state that the foreclosure crisis is concentrated in the so-called sand states of Florida, Nevada, Arizona, and California, with the financial instruments associated with these properties figuring disproportionately among the reams of toxic paper. The bulk of that development cannot be characterized as other than suburban in nature, whether of single-family homes, townhouses, condominiums, or what have you. It was emphatically not urban in nature, let alone high-density, mixed-use. Yes, these were vast swathes of suburbia, and one could factor out foreclosed row homes in Detroit, or high-rise condos which served as speculative objects for property flippers in Miami, and still be left with a decade of malinvestment in.... suburbia. The much-vaunted "ownership society" was at once a speculative society and a suburban society, the animating political calculus being that home ownership would cement new segments of the population to the GOP's economic agenda, by imparting to the new homeowners a sense of having a stake in the national enterprise.

This calculation was not at all unprecedented. The emergent Republican party of the mid-nineteenth century had as its slogan, "Free soil, free labor, free men"; while opposition to slavery and its expansion is usually recognized as the bedrock of this nascent ideology, the labour component is often reduced to a mere gloss on the anti-slavery aspect. However, in historical context, free labour meant more than merely the absence of slavery; it referred to the Republican effort to defuse the revolutionary ferment thought to lurk within the then emergent industrial economy of the North. Millions of wage-labourers, many of whom a generation earlier would have been either subsistence farmers or moderately prosperous farmers producing largely for local markets (or weren't even in the United States, having only immigrated beginning in the 1840s) , and who would have regarded the social independence of this estate as consonant with the republican ideals of the nation, chafed under the disciplines of wage-labour, not only because, in the decades prior to labour legislation, it was little better than servitude, but because its regimentation was felt, profoundly, to be a contradiction of American ideals of republicanism. Looking nervously across the Atlantic at the abortive revolutions of 1848, the Republicans hit upon the expedient of encouraging the settlement of the West, hoping thereby to defuse the tensions created by industrialism, and to create a new class of independent yeoman who, owing their good fortune to the Republican party and its programmes, would be amenable to sending Republicans to high offices as their representatives. It obviously didn't work out that way, both because the legislation providing for the land grants did not require that a tract be held by the original claimant, thus enabling lurid speculative frauds, replete with serial perjurers, and because the intersection of gold-standard economics and free trade in agricultural commodities resulted in a situation of falling crop prices and increasing debt valuations, with the consequence that enormous percentages of farmers were eventually reduced to penury and servility, in the end. The influence of the railroads, which received their own grants, only served to exacerbate the situation, as the grants typically included millions more acres than were required for rights-of-way and, owing to the atmosphere of corruption which suffused the entire process, were often disclosed to the connected well before their scope was made known to the public, enabling the politically-favoured to buy worthless land moments before it was made valuable by political fiat, profiting from Republican-engineered primitive accumulation. These transactions served only to increase the speculative impetus behind Westward expansion, forming a sort of speculative gravity drawing to itself every confidence-man, grifter, and mountebank who thought he could enrich himself by converting the public trust into private gain.

The significance of the historical antecedents, as regards the late financial bubble, lies in what they disclose, namely, the coincidence of property ownership, the felt imperative of expanding property ownership, and rank speculation, at inflection points of American history. We have been here before, each time heedless of the social costs, indifferent to the corruption, and contemptuous of those who would summon to consciousness the environmental costs (It should not be forgotten that, as the nineteenth century drew to its inglorious denouement, and agriculture in the American Midwest was increasingly concentrated, wedded to commodity-crop monoculture, and heedless of the environmental peculiarities of the prairie, the conditions were set for the Dust Bowls of the 1930s. Hostile to the ecology of the region, and the interlocked systems of plants which held the soils, and to the means of sustaining those soils, as evidenced by the agricultural practices they followed (monoculture, absences of wind-breaks, uprooting of most native grasses), American farmers facilitated the loss of billions of tons of soil, first to the Mississippi river basin, and the Gulf of Mexico, and later, to the atmosphere and the planet generally...). Analogously, today, the environmental costs of unrestrained suburban expansion are significant, involving the increasing concentration of an already unsustainable mode of industrial agriculture and the intensifying reliance on modes of transportation dependent upon declining resources. Analogously, as well, the costs of such speculative excesses are visible in the misallocation of resources, the corruption intrinsic to contemporary haute finance, now encompassing even political insurance of its imperatives, and the declining material fortunes of broad sections of the middle classes, the bulwarks of republicanism.

Underlying this discussion has been, it would appear, a solicitude for the suburban way of life, and a claim, perhaps only implicit, that the development of suburbia has occurred in accordance with 'market forces'. There are senses in which this is manifestly false, and a sense in which this is true, albeit trivially so. Any given configuration of 'the market' is artifactual, a contingent product of the intersection of law, custom, innovation, prudential judgment, the market positions of relevant economic actors, the political influence of those actors, and the cunning of history, that mysterious sense of 'oughtness' that transforms 'ideas in the air' into millions of discrete actions which appear as though concerted, because they reinforce emergent trends or path dependencies. To engage in trucking and bartering is natural to man, and indeed necessary to man; but is this is to say nothing more than that man is finite, resources are limited, and men must cooperate in some fashion if civilization and culture are to be possible, and to be sustained; and any actualized system of exchange will not be a brute transcription of natural, pre-political impulses or processes into some formal, social mode (one mustn't thus presuppose social contract theory in attempting to understand social and economic phenomena), but by the very fact of its existence at all will presuppose the political as its condition of possibility. For any concrete system of exchange requires, at a minimum, prudential judgment as to the application of intuitions of justice and equity to particular, contingent circumstances, and the sense of these procedures as having customary authority, which implies some notion, however ad hoc or ambiguous, of enforcement. Whatever one might hypothesize about the natural law and its relation to exchange and commerce, the natural law does not become actual and effective except as mediated by prudence, which is to say, by some form of positive legislation, for this people in these circumstances, having in mind the preservation/perpetuation/attainment of those objects. All of which is to say that it is a kind of category error to blandly inquire about the relationship of a given set of policies to 'market forces', as though those forces were somehow pre-political, apolitical, or natural in a sense that cannot be given to the political. When we are discussing something such as housing policy, and the political engineering underlying the housing market, and wondering whether these things are consistent with the market, we mustn't be mislead by language to imagine that we are wondering whether the political realm is consistent with something primordial lying outside of the political, outside the scope of negotiation, prudence, and the weighing of goods; what we are discussing in such cases is two aspects or components of this inherently political and human thing, society, being out of phase with one another. Attempts to invoke 'the market' are typically attempts to naturalize the historical and contingent, and this to short-circuit any deliberation over the objects of policy.

With regard to housing and the encouragement of both home ownership and suburbanization, there is another sense in which the references to market forces, and whether we have 'interfered' with them, is incoherent. For generations, governments at various levels have utilized, to throw out a partial list, the tax-deductability of mortgage interest, property taxation, zoning regulation (particularly the trend away from mixed use zoning towards single use zoning, which trend is the veritable prototype of suburban developement), monetary policy, lending regulations, urban redevelopment, highway construction (a de facto subsidy to the automobile culture, and a material precondition of suburbanization), the tax deductability of transportations costs borne by agribusiness concerns (rendering it economically viable to both pursue concentrated monoculture in a few regions of the country and to transport the produce to far-flung corners of the country, in which agriculture has dwindled; this is another subsidy to both the car culture and the suburban lifestyle, enabling the denizens of suburbia to enjoy the sorts of things that their development has purged from a region), and other policies, to encourage the development of suburbia. Doubtless readers could come up with other policies which have abetted such development. Given all of these things, it would be vain to protest that only more recent political innovations, be they the GSEs or the federal encouragement of subprime lending, as a vehicle for the expansion of minority homeownership, constituted political interventions in, and deformations of, the housing 'market'. Abolish these things at a stroke, and you would not have a pure, unadulterated market, but a different configuration of laws and policies favouring differing outcomes in the distribution and incidence of property ownership.

However, I don't believe that critics have in minds any of these considerations when they discuss suburbanization in the reverent tones of 'the market'. What is meant, it seems to me, is that people simply desire suburbanization and its accoutrements, in which instance the terms 'market' and 'desire' are functionally equivalent; what people want just is 'the market', and vice versa. As this is a fundamentally liberal argument, both anthropologically, and politically, there really isn't much more to state. That people like something, or want something, is neither normative nor decisive; instead, what is required is a reasoned, prudential weighing of goods, hopefully conducted with reference to the Burkean and Chestertonian notion of the democracy of the dead, and the as-yet unborn. It is stupefying that self-professed conservatives would, instead of posing the question, "what is it good for people in these circumstances to pursue?", ask as blandly as any utilitarian or pragmatist, "what is it that the people seem to want?" This is a doctrine of man, and his politics, as a utility-maximizer, and one who has been lately unmasked as irrational, to boot; and it is disgusting and indigestible.

Finally, I should also note that while many Americans do, in fact, harbour the desire for a little piece of the countryside, and all of the felicities thereof, that anything which can be possessed by everyone, or, at least, anything which public policy takes as an object, so that as many as might may possess it, is something which no one of those people can truly possess, except as a simulacrum or fantasy. All discussion of externalities and squandered resources aside, it is not a legitimate object of public policy, at least under wise and prudent authority, to indulge unattainable and fantastical strivings. We shall not all be rich, and neither can we be; we shall not all possess a house in the country, vast open spaces, and a bucolic idyll, and neither can we; and it is only ideology that tells us that we may, if but we will it.

Concluding Unscientific Postscript:

To this -

On the other hand, it is another thing entirely if a guy buys the land to put in a chicken farm on farmland, and then along comes the government and says, we know this is zoned for farm use, but we don't think a chicken farm is quite what we want this close to a park down the road, so we are changing the zoning on you. Can't you see that this is a taking?

I can only respond that if it is always a taking in some illicit, invidious sense to change the zoning of a given piece of property, whenever such a change would adversely affect the economic use or exchange-value of the property, then it becomes impossible both to effect any sort of prudential balancing of goods bound up with the use and possession of property, and to alter the present, development-centric emphasis of zoning policy. Imagine an hypothetical farmer or holder of rural land on the edge of a developing suburb/exurb, where the land is zoned rural. If it occurs to the owner of this property to request a change of zoning, so that it could be sold at a substantially higher price, and that requested change were denied, the owner could protest, quite logically, that such a denial was a 'taking', inasmuch as the boundary between the two adjacent zoning types was arbitrary, along with the granting of previous zoning changes making possible the development now abutting his property. There is no logical stopping point that can account for all of the use and economic interests of property owners, while refraining from the imposition of a 'taking' upon some of them, whether actual or hypothetical, should their plans and interests change. If, however, we deny his claim of having been subjected to a 'taking', that denial must be on the grounds of the zoning being what it is, and that decision will either be arbitrary or constituted by reference to goods or objects other than those envisioned by the property owner. Which is more or less the case with someone who wanted to put up a chicken farm - which can generate significant olfactory externalities, among others - but was subjected to a re-zoning: the zoning now is what it is, either arbitrarily or with reference to other goods, such as avoiding the stench and the potential pollution of groundwater. There is no basis upon which to distinguish the cases, save the initial state of the positive law (zoning); but the fact that both cases must be decided either purely arbitrarily or by reference to ends other than those of the property owner should indicate the the real issue is not the 'old switcheroo', but rather the interests reflected in the zoning laws themselves: why one property owner gets the switcheroo he doesn't want, while the other doesn't get the switcheroo he does want, has everything to do with prudential judgment, and why both property owners would feel aggrieved is matter of their having wanted to do something they were forbidden to do.

Comments (85)

But what if my answer to the question "what is it good for people in these circumstances to pursue?", is in fact that it is good for government policy to support people who "harbour the desire for a little piece of the countryside" because you are wrong about the externalities involved, wrong about "squandered resources" and wrong that a little piece of the countryside for many people represents "unattainable and fantastical strivings"? Much of what you argue, in the name of prudence, and competing goods does have a basis in an empirical reality -- and when we can't agree on what that reality is, it is hard to have a discussion about prudence and competing goods.

You say "We shall not all be rich, and neither can we be" but this statement is trivially true (fun phrase!) in the sense that we all can't be Bill Gates rich -- but an American family of four with an income of around $60K already lives a life that is "richer" than some of the richest kings of yesteryear and thanks to technology and the market economy, which I agree has been sustained and subsidized by western governments all these years, my hypothetical family has access to goods and services and a quality of life (e.g. the expectation that your kids won't die before their first birthday) that the richest kings of yesteryear couldn't even conceive. You say "we shall not all possess a house in the country, vast open spaces, and a bucolic idyll" but again, thanks to the wealth of this country there are State parks and vast open spaces within a couple of hours of almost every major metropolitan area in this country.

What is the end game for you -- if the 1950s America with its love of the car and suburbanization is bad, if the roaring post-Civil War era with its railroads and crazy Western expansion is bad, is the pre-Revolutionary era with its desire to trade rum and tobacco outside the confines of what Great Britain dictated and/or the desire of Americans to start their own industry and not rely on finished goods from Great Britain somehow bad as well? What economic arrangements meet with Maximos approval? How should we organize the market so that Maximos-defined human goods are satisfied?

Finally, as to your claims about income stability for the middle-class and our new "era in which both government and the great banking concerns are waxing ever stronger, debauching the economic system and degrading the republican qualities of our political system, transforming the Republic into a mere notion, and leaving in its place a grotesque, hybridized plutocracy", there is always Will Wilkinson to contend with:

And do check his blog where he responded to some of his critics...again, if we can't agree on what is actually happening in the world, I doubt we'll come to any agreement about the best way to organize the market to help it allocate scarce resources.

But what if my answer to the question "what is it good for people in these circumstances to pursue?"...

In such a case, the actual state of affairs, what follows is in fact the ordinary business of political life: various endeavours in persuasion and polemic; the marshaling of considerations, arguments, and data; and, in implementation, an endless series of transitory compromises between competing interests and conceptions of the good. Attempts to foreclose upon this process, and to bring it to a sort of stasis, by means of incantations about only minimally-conditioned "rights" to effectuate or realize this or that, though superabundant in our political discourse, are not so much parts of that discourse as attempts to circumscribe it, dishonestly naturalizing the historical; and in the context of discussions about the utilization of the natural world, are structurally analogous to incantations about "rights" in the abortion controversy, where the discounted good is the life of the child. (Note: the analogy is between the invocation of rights-claims as conversation-stoppers in the respective cases of disputes over property and abortion. "I have a right to do X with my property, to to acquire property having the character of Y" is doing the same sort of rhetorical work as "It's my body!", the absoluteness of the child's right to life, and the conditioned nature of goods of environmental preservation & etc. notwithstanding. Both are intended to end conversation, the first an absolutization of something merely relative, the second a false absolute simply.)

As regards the externalities of development, suffice it to state that if we cannot agree upon any set of facts concerning them, then any dialogue will become that much more difficult. Why anyone would be so motivated to deny the externalities of industrial agriculture, one critical impetus to which has been the trend of suburbanization, is entirely lost on me, but - to each his own, and to each man the use of his illusions.

wrong that a little piece of the countryside for many people represents "unattainable and fantastical strivings"?

Well, actually the suburban idyll is, at best, a simulacrum of the rural settings it displaces, best reflected in the names of many subdivisions, which invoke the features of the natural world now obliterated; the point is that no amount of imagining it so on the part of the suburbanite will make it such that he is enjoying the reality of what he has displaced.

...but an American family of four...

Again, the argument is not that these measure of material welfare are not, in fact measures of something real, but that they cannot become, abstracted from the nexus of diverse human and natural goods, exclusive or hegemonic measures of the good. Moreover, in consequence, the object of public policy cannot be to ensure that whoever may, may get rich; the "right to rise" is neither a primary good of human flourishing, nor a preemptive object of public policy. Likewise with home ownership and suburbanization. The existence of the National Parks is a meager substitute for an actual diversity of landscapes, environments, and local modalities of living, as wondrous as those parks are in reality.

I don't have an endgame in mind; my emphasis here is apophatic.

As regards Will Wilkinson, that utopian utilitarian, suffice it to state I agree with Jim Manzi that rising inequality gradually undermines the common man's sense of investment in the American endeavour, and is likely to produce political earthquakes at some point in time, and with critics of the financial system such as Simon Johnson that the disproportionate economic power of the "meritocracy" results in regulatory and ideological capture, where the interests of the wealthy establishment neither coincide with the interests of ordinary people, nor necessarily promote the good of the whole. I, and others, have critiqued Wilkinson in these pages in the past, and I am not persuaded that there is any necessity of slogging through a more sophisticated presentation of his doctrines in order to expose, once more, his begged questions about the nature of the good - which is, of course, the crux of the controversy, and not factual claims about how political and economic decisions are taken in this country. That is beyond disputation at this stage.

But what if my answer to the question "what is it good for people in these circumstances to pursue?", is in fact that it is good for government policy to support people who "harbour the desire for a little piece of the countryside"

If you answer that way, Mr. Singer, I think we will have achieved a real and valuable advance for clarity, and it is all tied up in that phrase "government policy."

The burden of my whole (interminable) argument with Lydia in the previous thread was that (a) in the last 18 months we have witnessed an extraordinary set of mostly unprecedented policy interventions to mitigate the damage from a real estate bubble's bursting; that (b) this bubble was itself a peculiar amalgam of governmental policy and usurious finance; and that (c) as one examines this whole fetid mess, one is struck by at once the continuities and the discontinuities of policy and finance over time. There is the continuity that Maximos adumbrates here, of state influence on real estate facilitating speculation and chicanery; and there is mind-numbing discontinuity represented by the recent financial innovations.

Now, my sense is that a great many people, especially on the Right, have failed to absorb the calamitous transformation (which might be more usefully understood as a consummation) effected over the past year and a half; so that when faced with a dispute between a development interest and some other non-commercial interest, they fall back on the pattern of market vs. government meddling, and (being right-wingers) naturally favor the development interest.

My response is to adapt the insights of Belloc: the development interest is not a purely market actor, or even purely commercial actor; rather, it is some relatively novel amalgam of commercial, banking and governmental interest. The development interest has alongside it (let us say) the Federal Reserve, which saved its skin last year by supporting the commercial paper market that was its primary method of day-to-day financing. It has alongside it the British Treasury, which bailed out its primary banker. It has alongside it the US Treasury, which has by various interventions forestalled the collapse of real estate values in this area, which collapse would have rendered this whole deal a non-starter. It has alongside it the FDIC, which facilitated the merger of the bank on the other side of the deal with a larger, healthier bank, without which intervention the deal would fall through.

It is not some wild fancy to point out that some big commercial real estate deal might include among its interested parties: the US Treasury, the Fed, the British Treasury, Royal Bank of Scotland (nationalized), BB&T, General Electric Co., and the FDIC -- all in addition to the corporation maneuvering for the purchase. If we expand the matter to include those actors that are exposed to all the securities associated with the mortgages . . . well, we can arrive at the sort of situation we saw repeatedly last year, where some poor town in Australia discovers that its pension fund is in technical default due its exposure to these American mortgage-backed securities.

The only class of people sure to profit from this byzantine tangle of arrangements is the lawyers.

So to me the old pattern of argumentation over market vs. government is just no longer useful when it comes to big corporate real estate deals.

I appreciate your arguments about the gold standard. It wasn't perfect, but it is important to remember that the farmers did not want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Rather, they wanted to expand the backing of the currency to include a very large supply of silver as silver is cheaper and much more abundant, but still finite (arguably fiat currency is finite too; limited by the amount of chemicals which can be used to make circuits and the electricity to charge them and the chemicals to print currency...)

This is an issue where the great question is which is the lesser of the two evils: a more limited currency or a fiat currency. I stand firmly on the side of the latter being the greater of the two evils because it is a fact that no political system has ever been able to restrain itself from destroying a fiat currency's value through constant meddling for the short-term gain of each generation of politicians. The lesson here goes back at least to the Roman Empire. It is one of those things where it may not HAVE to be so, but it IS so irrespective of the theory.

I think the solution is to back the currency with gold, silver, platinum and copper. With four valuable metals, it would be easier to expand the money supply, but there would still be a standard that would make political meddling difficult.

You say "We shall not all be rich, and neither can we be" but this statement is trivially true (fun phrase!) in the sense that we all can't be Bill Gates rich -- but an American family of four with an income of around $60K already lives a life that is "richer" than some of the richest kings of yesteryear and thanks to technology and the market economy, which I agree has been sustained and subsidized by western governments all these years, my hypothetical family has access to goods and services and a quality of life (e.g. the expectation that your kids won't die before their first birthday) that the richest kings of yesteryear couldn't even conceive. You say "we shall not all possess a house in the country, vast open spaces, and a bucolic idyll" but again, thanks to the wealth of this country there are State parks and vast open spaces within a couple of hours of almost every major metropolitan area in this country.

Hence why it is difficult to argue against sound money. A worker making $5 in 2010 under a sound money policy will still be poor, but in 2020 their same $5 wage will buy them a lot more if the government allows manufacturers to pass along the savings from increased productivity to their customers. Thus, as technology streamlines processes and makes them less capital-intensive, it is conceivable that by the time the worker goes to retire in 2050-2060 their $5 wage would buy the equivalent of $20-$30 in 2010.

I like a great deal of what Maximos says about the monetary system. The issue of a money standard is very difficult, not susceptible of clear solution. However,

All discussion of externalities and squandered resources aside, it is not a legitimate object of public policy, at least under wise and prudent authority, to indulge unattainable and fantastical strivings.

But no, you are being entirely too facile throwing about such phrases as ""unattainable and fantistical strivings."

Nobody could ever have known that the mono-agri methods would result in the dustbowl, unless we had tried it. Nobody would ever have known that intense coal and auto usage would result in acid rain, unless we had tried it. So called "wise and prudent authority" would only decide to butt into such areas AFTER we can prove there is a problem with such widespread usage.

Virtually the entire panoply of what you hold to be evil about suburbia as as such (not about how it was generated in terms of economics, but suburbia of itself) seems to be that it is fundamentally unsustainable. But I would submit that it is more certain that urbia is still LESS sustainable both in terms of economics and culture. So what then? Is your solution that of the Unabomber - kill off all but 50 million of the world's population? Or, say, each family having a small farm of 40 acres and subsistence level farming? Let's see, that would use up just about all of our non-desert, non-mountain, non-swamp, non-tundra land. No more parks, etc.

Maximos, mankind is still working the kinks out of progress and population growth. Until those kinks are worked out, you cannot expect that we will magically hit on a magic formula that just happens to not ONLY get it right for now, but ALSO gets it right for an increasing population and changing technology. Being pro-life means being pro-development. This is fundamental. And you simply cannot forecast the effects of development in such a way as to be "wise and prudent" about allocation of resources in the fine detail level and think you will get it right. Nobody can.

I can only respond that if it is always a taking in some illicit, invidious sense to change the zoning of a given piece of property, whenever such a change would adversely affect the economic use or exchange-value of the property, then it becomes impossible both to effect any sort of prudential balancing of goods bound up with the use and possession of property, and to alter the present, development-centric emphasis of zoning policy.

It is one thing to change zoning on property that in theory has a future use in development, a use that nobody has actually considered much less acted on; it is another thing entirely to change the zoning on land that the current owner has already done the planning for development and has already spent money on the initial stages.

Again, it is one thing to discover that we should NEVER have allowed a use that poison's the nearby water supply, and thus decide to stop it; and another entirely to decide to rezone to stop a development not because that sort of development is something that ought never be allowed at all times and places, but because WE WANT MORE that that particular piece of land remain undeveloped, because we simply value its undeveloped state more.

To do the latter is to say that the community places a higher value on its undevelopment than the owner places on it. If the community places such a higher value, the community should be willing to back that valuation up by buying the land from the owner, rather than taking it.

If you won't admit that these cases are different, then you are blind to what is obvious to everyone else.

For me it is precisely the reckless welter of usury and policy that convinced me on the unsustainability point. Two years ago, while I might have had sympathy with much of Maximos' preachment on suburbia, I would have stopped far, far short of calling it unsustainable, or of entertaining doubts about its character as a organic consequence of free enterprise.

Now, as I've argued at length, since it is clear that the financial structure of suburban development has been a ruinous boondoggle, which we have been rescued from only at the expense of a good chunk of our liberty, I have a very much more jaded view of the matter.

It is idle to answer, "we didn't need to sell our liberty for this rescue" because the sad fact is we were on that path at least as far back as the 1997 LTCM bailout, and likely farther back than that.

Now, as Maximos' will know well from our private discussions, I still do not go nearly as far as he does in critique of all this; and I think Tony has very effectively conveyed my reluctance. It rests, really, on a feeling that the judgment suffers from hindsight bias.

As I argued here, "The thing that strikes me as I study all this is a terrible sense of inevitability. Where in this chain of crises and decisions are the obvious points where normal statesmanship could have averted the disaster? ... Perhaps smarter, more knowledgeable men than me will eventually identify for us the Pickett's Charge, so to speak, of this tragedy of Usury -- the moment when a few decisions taken by a few crucial men truly formed the pivot round which the world turned. Perhaps some future historian of genius will one day explain for our posterity where a decisive stroke of statesmanship would have averted this disaster. But I cannot see it."

I would have stopped far, far short of calling it unsustainable, or of entertaining doubts about its character as a organic consequence of free enterprise.

Remember, Paul, as this post makes clear, Maximos doesn't even believe the question of whether something is an organic consequence of free enterprise is _meaningful_. One thing that really strikes me about this post is what a different set of directions he's going in from you. This is just one of them. He doesn't think there is a meaningful notion of "the market" or non-interference or anything. There are just decisions governments make based on what they think should be done, and things people do and want to do, and whether government lets them do those things, and that's about it. It's funny that you took the moral from his earlier post and your own reading that there was a contrast class of "organic development[s] of the market" and that suburban development doesn't fall into it, while really what he wants to say is that everything is so interconnected that we shouldn't even ask that question. In fact, he confirms in spades every word I said about opposing suburban development on a priori grounds--here, environmental considerations loom fairly large, for example.

That, of course, is just one of the many, many things I could say about this post, but I'm actually trying to stay away from it for lots of reasons.

As I argued here, "The thing that strikes me as I study all this is a terrible sense of inevitability. Where in this chain of crises and decisions are the obvious points where normal statesmanship could have averted the disaster? ... Perhaps smarter, more knowledgeable men than me will eventually identify for us the Pickett's Charge, so to speak, of this tragedy of Usury -- the moment when a few decisions taken by a few crucial men truly formed the pivot round which the world turned. Perhaps some future historian of genius will one day explain for our posterity where a decisive stroke of statesmanship would have averted this disaster. But I cannot see it."

I see a lot of parallels between the US legislation process and legal code and a failing enterprise IT infrastructure. No one wants to admit that the people who should be making the decisions are neither qualified to make them nor interested in becoming reasonably qualified, and they are certainly not controlling the people who are making them (this would be the case with administrative agencies and the courts). No one wants to impose radical changes because too many people will be inconvenienced and too many people are scared of the big "what if" surrounding the possibility of failure. Better a slow, steady, entropic failure that resembles rot and rigor mortis than possibly poisoning the patient instead of curing him. Every intelligent person knows that it's falling apart, and on some level knows that it is systemic. When it fails, it will take the entire business down and possibly either bankrupt or allow a hostile takeover.

But no one wants to take responsibility, make radical changes and go down trying to make things work.

"I think Tony has very effectively conveyed my reluctance. It rests, really, on a feeling that the judgment suffers from hindsight bias."

A distinction has to be made, however, between true hindsight bias and the recognition that in many cases the culprits in these various situations repeated past mistakes knowing that they were mistakes, and that suspicions, alarms, and red flags were ignored. There are, no doubt, occasions where we "learn the hard way." But many of these would be avoided if we paid attention to those who see those initial red flags and urge caution.

In any case we certainly shouldn't have to "learn the hard way" more than once. To use Tony's example of mono-agri methods, yes, they resulted in the dustbowl, and in other ways have been shown to be largely detrimental to agriculture in the long run. Yet, we still do it because they can be highly productive in the short term.

I think that what you see in all these situations is, in a nutshell, the knowing and willful disregard of long-term sustainability in favor of short-term gain and productivity.

Lydia -- I think I can say with confidence that neither Maximos nor myself has any illusions about the depth of our differences.

"Maximos doesn't even believe the question of whether something is an organic consequence of free enterprise is _meaningful_."

Let's see if he's ready to endorse that statement as a fair summary.

I think that often it is very meaningful indeed; but also that there is no necessary of it being meaningful. It is certainly possible for circumstances to render it meaningless.

As for Maximos' frequently-articulated view that markets should be seen as, at least in part, artifacts of law, custom, social state, etc. -- well, I am sympathetic to that view as well, while still stopping short of a full embrace of the Maximos maximum, so to speak. Same goes for the related point about the use of the term market as a kind of conversation-stopper; conservatives have regularly gone way overboard in trope of dismissing any critique of capitalist practice as issuing from a previous statist commitment. I have seen this trope most prominently in debates over immigration, where some free-marketers will treat any concern about sovereignty, patriotism, citizenship, rule of law, etc., as some sort of offense against the bedrock principle of a free labor market. To favor the integrity of the country becomes a stalking horse, on this view, for statism.

Rob G. -- Fair enough, as long as we also acknowledge that the same principle applies to the other side of the debate as well. The damaging unintended consequences of legislation designed to restrain development can be serious and easily foreseen as well.

For instance, I have a strong suspicion that a lot of the promises about the usefulness of wind-based power will in the end prove horribly overblown, and will we be left with a whole mass of new, readily-foreseeable problems related to the massive wind farms going up all over the country. My uncle, who retired from the Army's veterinary corps some years ago, is deeply concerned about the effect of these things on birds and other wildlife. He says miserably few impact studies have been done. We've been down this sort of road before as well.

Yes, I left out the Populists' campaign for bi-metallism, making the judgment that it was a needless detail for my argument, and one which, if included, would not have greatly altered any of the specifics.

A worker making $5 in 2010 under a sound money policy...

It may well be true that a worker under sound money - defined, arguendo, as the Gold Standard or some other metal-based system - would benefit in the long run, owing to the decline of real prices under conditions of growth. It is unclear to me, however, how the aforementioned problems of entrepreneurial investment and regressive redistribution can be overcome, except, perhaps, by foregoing most moneylending altogether and having investment undertaken solely by those who are either already flush or have arduously accumulated capital via a lifetime of savings.

Nobody could ever have known that the mono-agri methods would result in the dustbowl, unless we had tried it.

This is quite probably untrue. Soil science and hydrology are not obscure disciplines, only lately developed. Back in the nineteenth century in Australia, scientists who surveyed a region of the southeast, a vast river basin, determined, on the basis of the soils, geography, and climate, that there was a boundary beyond which agriculture as the settlers wished to practice it would be unsustainable. They developed the region, heedless of the warnings, and, lo and behold, what happened? The native vegetation cleared, the soils eroded; the soils and vegetation gone, the evaporation that sustained the rainfall in the region disappeared, and the basin is now a vast, unproductive, irrecoverable dustbowl. These things can be known in advance of catastrophic errors, it's merely the case that no one wishes to heed the counsel, because heeding it would result in lower exchange values - which is what happens anyway, in the long run, when the land is depleted and destroyed.

Nobody would ever have known that intense coal and auto usage would result in acid rain, unless we had tried it.

That much is true, but only because climate science is altogether more obscure and contested than those sciences bearing upon agriculture.

Virtually the entire panoply of what you hold to be evil about suburbia as as such (not about how it was generated in terms of economics, but suburbia of itself) seems to be that it is fundamentally unsustainable.

The development of suburbia was a response to fundamentally short-term economic incentives, all presupposing the indefinite perpetuation of the baseline condition of possibility, cheap and abundant petroleum. It was no coincidence that surpassing the peak of domestic oil production in the late sixties contributed to both the general social turmoil of the period, and the subsequent transformations of the American economy. But people are fully culpable for failing to realize, or acknowledge, that finite resources are, in fact, finite. We do not dwell at the foot of the Big Rock Candy Mountain, in terms of energy resources, or anything else, for that matter.

As regards the agricultural practices incentivized by suburbia, yes, these are unsustainable, and if this could not have been foreseen generations ago, it is known well enough now, such that there is no excuse for the perpetuation of the degeneration of the soil, the erosion of the soil, the creation of dead zones in the oceans owing to synthetic pesticide and fertilizer run-off, the pollution of groundwater, the accelerated evolution of drug-resistant bacteria owing to the unsanitary, inhumane, and drug-propped industrial production of meat, and so forth. We know that these externalities cannot be borne indefinitely, if at all; and it is vain to protest that the critics of our industrial agricultural system have yet to propose a viable alternative, for it does not follow from the absence of an alternative that the unsustainable is therefore sustainable, after all. The discussion in many circles concerned with development on this scale often centers on genetically-engineered crop varieties, as a means of adapting to changing environments, reducing required inputs, and so forth. We need to be honest about what this is - other than an attempt to primitively accumulate claims upon the world's food supplies - namely, an attempt to develop crop varieties that can accommodate changing conditions and constraints while perpetuating the global trade in agricultural commodities. There are thousands of crop varieties, now disused on account of the global commodity markets and their homogenizing requirements, which over the millenia of evolution and cultivation have been adapted to specific local conditions; and the principal, unspoken reason that these "heirloom" crops are not cultivated more widely in response to local conditions is simply the hegemony of the commodity markets. In other words, the genetic means of adapting to changing conditions already largely exist, but will not be adopted because this would entail the localization of many agricultural markets and regions. I, along with anyone truly appreciative of the import of Hayek's epistemology, am skeptical of the implicit claim that a few genetic engineers working for Monsanto and Con-Agra are possessed of greater knowledge than countless generations of evolution and mankind working together.

Being pro-life means being pro-development.

The devil lieth in the details. The externalities and unsustainable nature of most present development being what they are, it is scarcely a pro-life posture to deprive future generations of well-being in order that we might live more comfortable and prosperously in the present.

It is one thing to change zoning...

Generic zoning categories do not entail each potential specific usage as permissible, either in principle or in practice. As a matter of principle, it does not follow from the fact that a property falls under a given zoning category, thus creating a permutation space of potential uses, that any particular usage an owner has in mind, generally consistent with that designation, is thus licit. This is a straightforward matter of logic. In practice, even though a piece of land may be zoned for rural uses, thus opening the possibility that the owner might construct a chicken farm, the owner must still secure approval, hopefully via a process that adequately represents all of the relevant interests, and not merely his in making a buck. Ownership of property, and its possession under a given zoning designation, is not, and never has been, plenipotentiary authority over the disposition of that property, at least not in civilization. Now, if a zoning board has granted approval for a given development project, and subsequently reverses its decision on the basis of new arguments and/or evidence, this is prima facie grounds for a finding of a "taking", and thus that the property interests deserves some compensation, but if and only if the original process granting approval was bereft of corruption. One does not get to corruptly buy, bribe, or influence local governments, and then complain that one has been defrauded of property if/when the government reverses its decision; one has no licit claim to compensation for property or claims that one acquired illicitly. And trust me, zoning and development decisions are often hopelessly corrupt. Hell, the local government official, a zoning officer, who held up the permitting for my fence, was just sacked for taking bribes from various development interests. On the other hand, it is not a "taking" if properties are simply rezoned, rezoned in a way that may impact hypothetical exchange values, rezoned against the desires of an owner who may have wished to cash out, or develop, but had never been granted such approval, and so forth. A finding of a "taking" must concern projects previously approved and/or under way, assuming a transparent and honest process, and not an adverse impact upon merely hypothetical valuations and uses, for such would be to beg the questions of the objects of public policy, as well as the nature and scope of property rights, falsely establishing the maximization of exchange value as the hegemonic good of public policy. A "taking" must be something highly specific, and not just any old decision that adversely affects valuations.

Maximos doesn't even believe the question of whether something is an organic consequence of free enterprise is _meaningful_.

The "free market" is an artifact of history, both in its general form, and in the specifics of any given configuration of laws, policies, and economic actors. This is incontestable as a matter of economic history, and the most historically literate of free-market defenders and libertarians will concede as much, shifting the grounds of the argument to the matter of which policy ends should be promoted, and for what reasons. So, if we define a given configuration of law and policy as a "free market", based presumably upon some relative historical scale, it makes perfect sense to speak of some or other process as being an organic outcome if and only if that other process was itself not also the product of specific and definable positive interventions. The housing market generally, and suburbanization particularly, fail that criterion. Ever were they to qualify as organic under that criterion, this would still tell us very little, for it does not follow from the fact that there occurs an organic outcome of an artifactual set of preconditions that that outcome is wise or desirable. All that accomplishes is throwing the question back upon the set of preconditions: are they wise and just?

He doesn't think there is a meaningful notion of "the market" or non-interference or anything. There are just decisions governments make based on what they think should be done, and things people do and want to do, and whether government lets them do those things, and that's about it.

Well, no. These are decisions that are taken by authority in the immanent metaxy of government, private interests, and prudential judgment; they arise out of the give-and-take of ordinary governance, as diverse interests, public and private, all jostle for influence and their desired outcomes. "Non-interference" only has meaning in relation to either a status quo which someone wishes to valorize as the best, or best possible, all things considered, expression of economic affairs, or an hypothetical but also contingent stateof economic affairs. It is a relative term, meaning that the relevant question is not, "Does this interfere with The Market" - this is merely a reification - but, "How then shall we structure the market?", ie., a specific subset of the broader civilizational question, "How then shall we live?" Invocations of "The Market" or "rights" are typically attempts to veil particular and contingent claims and objectives beneath a veil of reification and abstraction, attempts to bypass the difficult labour of arguing for a particular configuration of goods and rights by means of mystification. That is to say, they usually just beg the question at hand.

In fact, he confirms in spades every word I said about opposing suburban development on a priori grounds--here, environmental considerations loom fairly large, for example.

Again, no. Suburban development was a wasteful utilization of resources, and the push to expand homeownership misguided and ill-fated, given the actual configuration of the American economy. Moreover, it was undertaken heedless of real and insuperable environmental and resource limitations. Even had those environmental limitations not existed, ex hypothesi, suburbanization and the push to expand homeownership would have been inconsistent with the logic of our (contingent) political economy, which both incentivizes transience and places downward pressure on incomes and standards of living, thus decreasing the general ability to pay for owner-occupied housing.

How to account for the shared timeline between abortion's legalization and the growth of suburban sprawl and the homage each pays to Convenience?

Social capital is developed through intimacy and relationship. Communities need vital centers that draw people together, not far-flung enterprises based on a personal and geographic distance that reaches it apotheosis in the usage of drive-in windows.

On the wind farms, I have reason to suspect there's a lot of propaganda for them in elementary school science textbooks. I've caught a peek at some material designed to test elementary students' science knowledge, and the push on wind power is really strong.

Now, as Maximos' will know well from our private discussions, I still do not go nearly as far as he does in critique of all this; and I think Tony has very effectively conveyed my reluctance. It rests, really, on a feeling that the judgment suffers from hindsight bias.

Paul, two things. I agree with Tony's sentiment that we ought to favor "development" rather than lifeless stagnation. I also think there's something to be said about criticisms suffering from hindsight bias in general.

But, I am not sympathetic to attempts to defend federal policies and their outcomes favoring suburbia and related ills against criticisms by claiming "no one could have known, critics suffer from hindsight bias." If no one could have known about the consequences of policies binding an entire nation, then you don't enact the policy. The relevant principle of prudence is that the bigger the scale of the policy's reach, the greater the burden of proof must be to enact the policy. Rushing in to enact policies that affect every state in the union and then claiming "no one could have known" when unintended consequences transpire is a peculiarly modern reaction of being shocked, just shocked at the consequences of hubris and an attempt to reject responsibility not for being ignorant, but for assuming one's wisdom were sufficient.

Similarly, everyone favors "development"--just like "progress." It's just that it's difficult to perceive whether something is or leads to development or if it is or leads to folly. But prudence suggests starting local and small because we know the particular, concrete circumstances of localities best and so are least likely to find ourselves in situations where we are shocked, just shocked at what has befallen. So to me, there is precious little to justify the federal policies that have led to sprawl, big business, massive waste in healthcare, etc. today.

It may well be true that a worker under sound money - defined, arguendo, as the Gold Standard or some other metal-based system - would benefit in the long run, owing to the decline of real prices under conditions of growth. It is unclear to me, however, how the aforementioned problems of entrepreneurial investment and regressive redistribution can be overcome, except, perhaps, by foregoing most moneylending altogether and having investment undertaken solely by those who are either already flush or have arduously accumulated capital via a lifetime of savings.

Technology is rapidly making it cheaper to acquire the tools to get started. It is also not inherently true at all that we need go back to the Gold Standard, as a mixed metal standard, a silver standard or even a copper standard would be preferable to no standard but the smiling, fatherly face of Uncle Sam promising repayments and sound judgment. Silver and copper, both valuable, but cheap metals, could be either combined with a gold standard or used as substitutes.

Entrepreneurial activity happened all of the time under the gold standard. It was easier to get wiped out, but one of the driving forces behind all of the regulation from the progressive era was that the entrepreneurial activity was attacking the big corporations that rose up from time to time like a school of piranhas on a herd of cattle.

A mixed metal approach or a silver standard would allow the economy to have similar levels of cash, but without the freedom to create cash ex nihilo that has bailed out so many moronic politicians whose answer to everything is to put the printing presses into high gear.

"As regards the agricultural practices incentivized by suburbia, yes, these are unsustainable, and if this could not have been foreseen generations ago, it is known well enough now, such that there is no excuse for the perpetuation of the degeneration of the soil, the erosion of the soil, the creation of dead zones in the oceans owing to synthetic pesticide and fertilizer run-off, the pollution of groundwater, the accelerated evolution of drug-resistant bacteria owing to the unsanitary, inhumane, and drug-propped industrial production of meat, and so forth. We know that these externalities cannot be borne indefinitely, if at all;"

I don't know any of these things...in fact, as countless libertarian and free-market economists never cease to argue it is precisely in advanced industrial nations with their suburban sprawl and industrial agriculture that the environment, as measured by all sorts of metrics, is better than in undeveloped third world countries (check out Bjorn Lomborg's work for the data on this subject). As always, three cheers for Norman Borlung and innovation and economies of scale -- these all promote the common good from my perspective, because I'm looking at data that doesn't comport with the Maximos worldview:

It is a relative term, meaning that the relevant question is not, "Does this interfere with The Market" - this is merely a reification - but, "How then shall we structure the market?", ie., a specific subset of the broader civilizational question, "How then shall we live?"

There's a bit of mischief going on here. Who is the "we" that is supposed to be asking these questions? Is it the same entity in both cases? "How then shall we live?" appears to be mostly an individual question. I have quite a bit of control over how I choose to live. "How then shall we structure the market?" on the other hand, is not. I personally, have very little control over how the market is structured, and neither do you (otherwise, you wouldn't be complaining about how it's structured). If the persons asking the two questions are different, then one cannot be a subset of the other.

Invocations of "The Market" or "rights" are typically attempts to veil particular and contingent claims and objectives beneath a veil of reification and abstraction, attempts to bypass the difficult labour of arguing for a particular configuration of goods and rights by means of mystification. That is to say, they usually just beg the question at hand.

This sounds a unnervingly like a Marxist charge of "false consciousness", and it is simply false as a matter of logic.

For example: Let's say I protest the Chinese government's one-child policy on the premise that it violates the people's "rights", and that no central planners ought to have the authority to interfere with the decisions of "The Family" like that. It doesn't follow that I have a particular idea of how many children a "properly configured" family should have that I am trying to force on everybody. I'm saying that no man has the right or the competency to make that decision, and my claim is simply that. No reason to attribute false motives to me.

Just so with the markets. I claim that nobody has the competency or the right to exert the kind of intrusive, centralized control over people's lives that addressing your complaints would seem to require.

It's kind of tough to know how to read you, btw. Either you're calling for the government to step in with a heavy hand and stop all these activities you find problematic, or you're just railing at the world for not conforming to your ideals in general (in which case, welcome to the club).

The "we" is the collective "we" who are responsible, in a multitude or ways, and through numerous modalities, for the construction of a culture and civilization. Thus, there is no mischief.

Just so with the markets.

Family and markets are disanalogous in the crucial sense, inasmuch as the family is a natural community, while the market is a artifact, an historical construct elaborating upon certain natural necessities and inclinations. And no one is talking about centralized control. I'm merely arguing that it isn't an infringement of property rights if a local government decides not to rezone some farmer's property commercial or residential, so that he can sell it and bank a larger return; and the local government is entitled to make that decision because property rights are not plenary in nature, but, having externalities and obtaining within the context of community, may be circumscribed by other interests and goods.

For example: Let's say I protest the Chinese government's one-child policy on the premise that it violates the people's "rights", and that no central planners ought to have the authority to interfere with the decisions of "The Family" like that. It doesn't follow that I have a particular idea of how many children a "properly configured" family should have that I am trying to force on everybody. I'm saying that no man has the right or the competency to make that decision, and my claim is simply that. No reason to attribute false motives to me.

Just so with the markets. I claim that nobody has the competency or the right to exert the kind of intrusive, centralized control over people's lives that addressing your complaints would seem to require.

Modern security experts start from the position of least privilege when suggesting security policies. The less authority someone needs to do their task, the better. It is always up to the person who is doing the task to justify an expansion of privilege, not up to those around them to justify holding them back. Most of our problems come from the fact that the average person finds this too burdensome and the elites find it intolerable that every expansion of power should require explicit statute or even a constitutional amendment.

It also stands to reason that if God created the state as a form of grace, then when the state is not behaving in such a fashion by behaving tyrannically, it is illegitimate. No one who loves their neighbor ever behaved like a tyrant toward them.

Btw, Maximos, with regards to your charge of reification, you are correct. "The Market" is a term of reification. In fact, there is no real entity called "The Market". What there is is a huge number of individuals making a huge number of personal decisions and agreements with each other, entering into contracts, raising families, and going about their lives in general.

The "we" that you refer to when you say "How then shall we structure the market?" is also a reification. There is no cohesive entity called "we" that is making coherent decisions about the market. There is, on the one hand, a huge number of individuals making countless individual decisions about how to invest their possessions, and on the other hand, a single group of people that exerts authority called "the government".

The individual people have no power to even attempt grand planning over the structure of the markets, whereas the government does.

So if you really want to de-reify things, then sentences like "We shouldn't allow the McDonaldization of historical landmarks by The Market", in order to be cashed out into concrete terms, and assuming it's a prescription and not just a complaint about the state of things, must necessarily be translated into the government herding countless individuals and micro-managing their financial decisions under threat of force, based on the aesthetic preferences of some designated bureaucrats.

Family and markets are disanalogous in the crucial sense

The disanalogy is irrelevant to the point I was making, which is that claiming that the no man should rightly have control over the configuration of something doesn't imply that you are really trying to defend some particular configuration that you favor instead.

property rights are not plenary in nature

Does this apply to all property rights, or just land property rights? And is there a hard line between the government being entitled to dictate how you may use your property in arbitrary ways (by which I mean, not previously spelled out in law), and and being entitled to confiscate it?

What there is is a huge number of individuals making a huge number of personal decisions and agreements with each other, entering into contracts, raising families, and going about their lives in general.

And, as I have argued ad nauseum, they are only able to do so because they are able to avail themselves of the pre-existing legal and cultural architecture which provides for such undertakings, which framework, complex and multifaceted though it is, is an artifact of history and judgment.

The "we" that you refer to when you say "How then shall we structure the market?"

Oh, there is no singular "we", in the sense that our society is a simple unitary state possessing a singular collective decision-making mechanism; but there there multiple, overlapping "we" units, from local governments on up to the Federal government, however greatly abused and degraded this system has become. And even at the local level, there are laws governing the usage of property, and decisions regarding the disposition of property occur within this framework. All of which is to say that this notion of there existing a single group of people in authority called "the government", operating over against millions of discrete, individual actions, is itself a reification, and the existence of multiple particular governments is not an oppression of the millions making those decisions, but the precondition, in our society, of them making any decisions at all. Absent a pre-existing order, enforceable by law, there is no liberty of any meaningful kind.

...which is that claiming that the no man should rightly have control over the configuration of something...

No man does. Many men do, as representatives of our society, at various levels of authority and responsibility, for their having this authority is the precondition of there being a 'something' in the first instance. If there is no law structuring a market, the market does not exist, which becomes obvious once one reflects upon the status of a particular contract in the absence of any law of contracts.

Since you refuse to read Wilkinson's piece I linked to in your previous post, which I should note includes a lot of data about the "decline in wages" or whatever you prefer to call the so-called drop in American's living standards ever since "globalization" came along, maybe you'll find this brief editorial worthy of a few minutes of your attention:

In an online debate with the Atlantic's economics writer, Megan McArdle, Shell observes with disapproval that, when prices are adjusted for inflation, Americans today spend "40% less on clothes, 20% less on food, more than 50% less on appliances, about 25% less on owning and maintaining a car" than they did during the early 1970s. Over that same period, Census Bureau tables show, U.S. median household income rose by at least 18% in constant dollars -- despite the much-lamented (by Shell and others) decampment of "once flourishing" manufacturing jobs to China and elsewhere. That's why even America's poorest people nowadays can afford automobiles, cellphones and TVs.

First, let me emphasize that a main point of my paper is that real material inquality is much lower than nominal income and consumption measure lead many people to think. The reason is that these measures aren’t measures of real material inequality. I argue that there is good (though not drop-dead) reason to believe that standards of living have become more equal over time.

The devil lieth in the details. The externalities and unsustainable nature of most present development being what they are, it is scarcely a pro-life posture to deprive future generations of well-being in order that we might live more comfortable and prosperously in the present.

I think this is the heart of what our disagreement is really about. You think that we should not undertake a new use, or an increased level of the same use, until we can be confident that this change is sustainable. I recognize the pull of this theory, but I do not feel that it can actually be carried out in reality.

As a father of a large family, I know the dozens, nay, hundreds of times, that I have been called on to decide whether the undertake a change in what or how we use things, or how much. By far the majority of those times, I can only reasonably estimate the 3 or 4 or 5 major effects of that change, not the 250 other effects that will affect both my children, and their great-grandchildren, and my neighbors, and the people down-wind, and the people down-stream, and the chemical change in our wood, and so on. When I decide, for example, whether to treat for termites, I have to consider a balance between a risk that termites will eat the house, thus forcing us to build a new house in less than a generation, versus putting a bunch of chemical into the ground, some of which may find its way into the water supply a hundred miles away. I don't know for sure which of these options is more damaging to the environment, and nobody else does either.

When I say that being pro-life means being pro-development, I mean this quite rigorously. You cannot be open to being "fruitful and multiply" while maintaining that you must first be sure that a change in how you use the environment is sustainable. Because we cannot ever know that increasing the demand on the environment is sustainable until we have tried it. When you add a new child to the population, it is impossible to be sure that the demands this child makes will be sustainable. All you can do is make a reasonable guess from the evidence so far at hand. And the VAST bulk of the evidence at hand is in this form: "will I be able to afford to buy the food, clothing, shelter, medicine, and education that this child will need?"

I agree completely that a person cannot form a true estimation of the answer to this question if the markets are gravely disordered. With disorder, he will not be able to see if his being able to "afford" is really subsidized by others, including by future generations. BUT: if he decides not to have a child because he won't trust the markets to tell him the resources are available, there won't BE any future generation. Who then is he depriving more?

So where does that get you? This: Humility requires us to accept that God does not give to men the foresight to know with confidence in advance how his all choices will come out. This is most manifest in complex areas, such as economics and politics. At the same time, man must needs make choices on such matters. Therefore, the same God Who commands men to be fruitful and multiply and Who denies to men the ability to foresee with confidence and clarity whether our use of resources is sustainable, wills that we humbly make reasonable choices with the evidence we have, and then ask God to supply what we need. This dynamic is mentally and spiritually different from that which the secular humanists would insist is the only acceptable stance - that we a firm prospect of getting ALL of the future need for a child (in a sustainable manner) before we take on the "burden" of that child.

No doubt Maximos will state that many times we have NOT made reasonable choices with the evidence available. This is undoubtedly true. I will not claim otherwise. What I ask is whether the Joe Plumber who examines his wallet and savings account and his employment history, and decides to buy a house in the suburb for his growing family, can say with reasonable certainty that he himself is causing unsustainable resource allocations? Let me extend the question further: if the "markets" did not prop up false ideas of costs, and Joe could still afford the house in the suburb, would his choice to move there still be considered, with reasonable confidence, the cause of unsustainable resource allocation?

...the so-called drop in American's living standards ever since "globalization" came along...

It isn't a complete decline in living standard, there is just much greater economic pressure on families, for various reasons. The author doesn't mention it in this article, but she does in one of her lectures, that within the space of a generation nearly every parent went from thinking a high school diploma was sufficient to get into the middle class to thinking that a college degree was the only way to get into the middle class. Because of that, there is an intense competition for all levels of education.

I haven't refused to read Wilkinson's piece: I read it when it was published and was not persuaded that it reshaped the debate in any fundamental way. I have refused to re-read it, because there is no gain in marginal utility to an exhausted, unwell man in revisiting something he originally found interesting, but unpersuasive. We could engage in "dualing economic data" until the full disclosure of the eschaton, and nothing would be accomplished thereby. I note that a burden of Wilkinson's argument is that while income inequality may be burgeoning, this is of scant consequence because consumption inequality is decreasing, a shrewd maneuver to dismiss the significance of statistics such as this, which demonstrate a general stagnation of household income since the seventies. Things are getting cheaper, and financial innovation made it possible for middle-class Americans to borrow on a larger scale in order to finance consumption, never mind the longer hours worked to maintain those stagnant or glacially growing incomes, or the unsustainability of the debt, or the obvious rejoinder to Wilkinson's argument about consumption inequality, namely, that if the wealthiest aren't really garnering that much more in consumption and happiness from their rapidly-expanding incomes, they could easily forgo some of their multiplying compensation in order to ameliorate some of the real instabilities and hardships endured by the lower orders, who may enjoy their postmodern bread and circuses of cheap consumer appliances, but suffer genuine insecurities and needs.

But as I've said, this doesn't really alter the debate, or our running exchanges. We either don't agree on the data, or agree on the data, but dispute its significance, and its long-term implications. Step2 is correct to observe that there isn't a complete decline in living standards, but as one may observe reading between the lines of Wilkinson, "cheaper goods" are doing the lion's share of the work, relative to "increasing median household income" in smoothing out the peaks of consumption inequality. Moreover, the greater pressures on families come in the forms of less stable employment, often at multiple jobs, as well as the perceived imperative of shouldering an ever-increasing burden of debt in order to acquire the steerage-class pass to the middle classes. And this process will confront diminishing returns, not merely of an economic nature, but of a genetic nature, as IQ is a real feature of the world, not a social construct.

Because we cannot ever know that increasing the demand on the environment is sustainable until we have tried it.

But we can know this in may instances, as I've already argued. In some instances, there is no necessity of multiplying our demands upon the environment, realizing the destructive and futile nature of our demands, and relinquishing them. Such has often been the case with respect to agricultural practices, and where the prior evidences have been equivocal, much of the data are now in: there are dead zones in some of the oceans (there is large one in the Gulf), erosion has occurred, medical research is linking the higher concentrations of nitrogen and nitrates integral to industrial agriculture with higher incidences of certain diseases, industrial ag is time-constrained, dependent as it is upon finite supplies of fossil fuels, the necessity of dosing feedlot animals with massive doses of antibiotics has facilitated the emergence of virulent bacterial strains, and so forth. Though epistemological humility may be requisite in other undertakings and settings, we know enough to be warranted in skepticism regarding industrial ag and suburbanization. The issue in the specific case with which I am concerned is not epistemology, but practical reason; many people would prefer to reduce greatly the number of relevant factors taken into account in any given decision process, as well as the relevant temporal horizon. However, once could with equal humility and faith have that additional child, acknowledge the environmental realities that are presently known, and commend the rest to God.

However, once could with equal humility and faith have that additional child, acknowledge the environmental realities that are presently known, and commend the rest to God.

Except that it won't be that additional child, it will be several, if the hostility toward birth control in all forms from the Catholic Church is obeyed by society en masse. With our level of technology, it is inconceivable that the combination of no family planning, our increasingly powerful medical and biotech sciences and higher life expectancies would not lead us to being as large of a nation as China is today within a few generations. The obvious downside to that if we do not pursue a policy of vigorous expansion is densely populated urban areas, terribly high property values everywhere such that few can afford a traditional marriage and a house, and the environmental costs that come from packing a billion people into the areas of the US most conducive to trade and with access to enough water to sustain the population and/or agriculture.

I am not defending birth control or encouraging massive expansion, merely pointing out that the without birth control AND without serious expansion, the consequences ARE quite obvious. In fact, there are several major countries that have already stress-tested that scenario and found it to be... less than ideal.

Except that it won't be that additional child, it will be several, if the hostility toward birth control in all forms from the Catholic Church is obeyed by society en masse.

Yeah, better we close ourselves off to life than form aesthetically appealing, and economically and environmentally sustainable communities. Contraceptive "family planning" is preferable to the inevitable "tyranny" of Planning Boards and the pro-sprawl values of personal sovereignty, convenience,independence and transaction are part of a cultural miasma that is hostile to community,self-denial,interdependence and relationship. What is the argument against a "Reproductive health clinic" being placed in the same mall alongside the Big Box?

As regards the issue of family size, and as one favourably disposed towards large families, I must state that moral and religious ideals and obligations do not alter in the slightest the facticity of physical facts. These latter do not cease to be facts, or alter their relation to factuality by being brought into relation with the obligations. That the externalities of the Green Revolution are what they are, in other words, is not changed by the fact that large families are wonderful.

medical research is linking the higher concentrations of nitrogen and nitrates integral to industrial agriculture with higher incidences of certain diseases, industrial ag is time-constrained, dependent as it is upon finite supplies of fossil fuels, the necessity of dosing feedlot animals with massive doses of antibiotics has facilitated the emergence of virulent bacterial strains, and so forth.

So far as I know (and I am far from educated in overall agri production, so maybe I don't know), the total output of non-industrial agricultural methods is a small fraction of that under industrial methods, per hour of labor or unit of cost. Therefore, giving up industrial methods and returning to non-industrial methods will, inevitably, reduce the total world's supply of food by a very large portion of the current output. Maximos, which portion of the world's population are you going to kill off to achieve this? That's why I mentioned the Unabomber - that was the point of his manifesto.

I don't really know whether ultimately we will give up industrial methods as a bad deal, but think that if we do, it will either be voluntarily because there is a replacement approach which provides as much food, or it will be as a failed civilization altogether. We may be heading down the road of failed civilization anyway, but at least in terms of the physical side of things, we seem to keep throwing up patches and band-aids and small improvements here there and everywhere, and we have been doing so for so long that it is difficult to predict that it will collapse anytime soon. In the late 1960's, Paul Ehrlich and the Population Bomb people predicted that collapse in the 1980's, and they were totally wrong. "in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death", that nothing can be done to avoid mass famine greater than any in the history, and radical action is needed to limit the overpopulation. Hah.

Since I am not a farmer, I cannot reasonably ascertain whether the strawberries I buy at the store are being raised sustainably or not. Indeed, there have been some indications that some of the efforts to grow sustainably have been completely wrong on their guesses about how to do that. Does that mean that I should stop buying food until I can be confident that the food IS grown sustainably?

The issue in the specific case with which I am concerned is not epistemology, but practical reason; many people would prefer to reduce greatly the number of relevant factors taken into account in any given decision process, as well as the relevant temporal horizon. However, once could with equal humility and faith have that additional child, acknowledge the environmental realities that are presently known, and commend the rest to God.

I am sorry, but the thought behind that last sentence escapes me. It appears that you are saying that one could knowingly take an irrational step to have another child, and commend oneself to God for the outcome.

Except that it won't be that additional child, it will be several, if the hostility toward birth control in all forms from the Catholic Church is obeyed by society en masse. With our level of technology, it is inconceivable that the combination of no family planning, our increasingly powerful medical and biotech sciences and higher life expectancies would not lead us to being as large of a nation as China is today within a few generations.

Mike T, I agree. (Somewhat unusually, for a pro-life Catholic.) Therefore, I believe that it is essential that people exercise their right to use their fertility intelligently. It is just that I think that the obligation to be rational about it cannot, on the individual level, be accomplished except by looking at "what I can afford to provide for a new child."

On the societal level, the best thing we could possibly do overall would be to make sure that the real, full costs are in plain sight and ascertainable. This would require, at a minimum, undoing the distortions of many government- and business-originated interferences in the markets. But it might also require government involvement in establishing a mechanism to force long-term costs (such as what erosion does to crop production or ocean effects) to appear on the balance sheet. I am not in principal opposed to that, but I cannot for the life of me think of an occasion where the government has done such a thing without mucking it up with political glop that makes the whole process questionable, to say the least. The sciences behind such future long-term cost projections are so far from solid that there can be no realistic common agreement on them, and without general agreement the imposition of government force cannot but appear as a taking of individual rights and liberties. I think back to the disastrous attempt to "manage" Yellowstone's wildlife: getting rid of wolves let elk increase, which damaged the growth of new aspen, which damaged beaver habitat, which damaged other things. Loss of wolves let coyotes go wild, which adversely affected smaller predators such as fox and wolverines. Etc. The effects of our efforts to fix things just aren't all that foreseeable.

Maybe it is simplest to say that I am a science-directed government-imposed constraint skeptic. Maximos is a individual-directed freedom-from-interference skeptic. Which one approach should have presumptive claim when the jury is still out?

Mike T, I agree. (Somewhat unusually, for a pro-life Catholic.) Therefore, I believe that it is essential that people exercise their right to use their fertility intelligently. It is just that I think that the obligation to be rational about it cannot, on the individual level, be accomplished except by looking at "what I can afford to provide for a new child."

It is like the time-quality-cost triangle: you can have two, but not all three.

I have faith in the ability of mankind to mitigate the shortcomings of the fallen natural world, but not enough to justify the position that Maximos takes which is that we can grasp at all three ideals/goals at once and leave the details up to Providence and engineers to fix. Let's be serious here, if fertility is not rationally controlled, families of at least six children would not be uncommon in the least, and families with as many as 12-15 kids would be another somewhat common outcome. Our existing infrastructure could not handle that for more than maybe two generations.

As I said, I am not advocating abortion or abortaficient birth control. I am merely pointing out the irony of lecturing others on prudence and wisdom when the patently obvious long-term result of two conflicting ideals (essentially unconstrained fertility and holding back development) is massive poverty and misery for the masses which negates a serious third ideal (a dignified existence for the common man).

Maybe it is simplest to say that I am a science-directed government-imposed constraint skeptic. Maximos is a individual-directed freedom-from-interference skeptic. Which one approach should have presumptive claim when the jury is still out?

The individual. As I mentioned above, the most effective security policy for avoiding imprudent decisions and accidents is the principle of least privilege. Starting from the government, going down to the individual is a way of approaching it as a principle of most privilege in solving problems. The individual is generally incapable of making society-changing decisions and the damage from their actions is almost always easier to mitigate than ones done as official policy.

"So far as I know (and I am far from educated in overall agri production, so maybe I don't know), the total output of non-industrial agricultural methods is a small fraction of that under industrial methods, per hour of labor or unit of cost. Therefore, giving up industrial methods and returning to non-industrial methods will, inevitably, reduce the total world's supply of food by a very large portion of the current output."

This is an oversimplification, and incorrect at that. A great deal of the hunger problems in developing countries are related not to production of food, but to distribution. Also, agribusiness tends to undercut family farms and subsistence agriculture in those nations in the same way it does here. The result in those countries is worse, however, as their local economies are far more dependent on small farms and subsistence farming than we are.

Another way that agribusiness sabotages local indigenous farming efforts is by what is known as "agri-dumping," that is, selling our surplus grain to foreign countries at a cost lower than that at which the locals can produce it.

The pressure to "get big or get out" is exerted on third-world farmers just as much as it was here in the 1940s and 50s (and still is, actually). Meanwhile, while productivity in a loose sense increases, farm income continues to drop, small farms close or are bought by the big guys, and agribusiness profits steadily rise.

This is an oversimplification, and incorrect at that. A great deal of the hunger problems in developing countries are related not to production of food, but to distribution.

The other major factor is the subsidies we give to our own agriculture which is then exported to those countries at reduced costs made possible with our tax dollars. The obvious solution is to stop redistributing wealth to farmers (most of which ends up in the hands of agribusiness) and to encourage foreign aid in the form of infrastructure development, not handouts.

Let me extend the question further: if the "markets" did not prop up false ideas of costs, and Joe could still afford the house in the suburb, would his choice to move there still be considered, with reasonable confidence, the cause of unsustainable resource allocation?

Did I miss where Maximos answered this question of Tony's? I'm not being sarcastic. I haven't had time to read all the comments that have come in since last night. But I haven't found it in what I have read. I thought it was a darned good question. It was so good, that it stopped me from a little rant of my own that wouldn't have been nearly as good, for which blessing of self-restraint I am grateful to Tony. :-)

A great deal of the hunger problems in developing countries are related not to production of food, but to distribution. Also, agribusiness tends to undercut family farms and subsistence agriculture in those nations in the same way it does here.

farm income continues to drop,

I may be dense, but this does not seem possible. A subsistence farmer, almost by definition, does not depend on outside resources, and also does not depend on outside sales (at competitive or non-competitive prices). So how can our market structure hurt him? A farmer that has 0 income does not care if farm income continues to drop.

Also, if the problem in hungry countries is mainly a matter of distribution (read: despotic governments using imported food-control as a mechanism of people-control), doesn't this imply that the western food is not available to the working stiff who would otherwise (but for interference denying access) be able to buy food? Doesn't that mean that those poor sods should be ready, willing, and able to either (a) work subsistence farming to feed themselves, or (b) buy from other nearly-subsistence level farms directly, without importing food at "cheaper" prices from the nonsensical west?

Which is it: the local farmers cannot sell as cheaply as the Western grown food is selling on their markets because the local non-insdustrial methods are more expensive, or access to Western foods is prohibited so Western prices are irrelevant to the local market? Can't be both.

I think that everyone realizes that subsistence farming tends to be nasty, brutish, short, and incredibly difficult, (not to mention risky as all hell) and the only reason to do it is that it is that you have NO OTHER CHOICE. It certainly does not lend itself to the life of intellectual pursuits, arts, sciences, etc. And it barely produces enough to feed/sustain one family, not several others. If everyone in the world were to become subsistence farmers (in order to be quite sure that they were living sustainably), there would be (a) no higher pursuits at all, and (b) less than 1/10 of the current population. Because the other 90 % depend for their very lives on the excess food generated by better-than-subsistence level farming, farming which produces 10 or 50 times as much food per unit of effort.

The obvious solution is to stop redistributing wealth to farmers (most of which ends up in the hands of agribusiness) and to encourage foreign aid in the form of infrastructure development, not handouts.

I am all for that. The insane farm handout industry is truly grotesque. By all means, re-establish a sane standard so that true prices of production and development are ascertainable.

So to me the old pattern of argumentation over market vs. government is just no longer useful when it comes to big corporate real estate deals.

Paul, I can see that. The intermix of government control forces with business interests has gotten so thoroughly muddled that there is no clear carving out what is caused by "markets" and what is caused by government involvement. So argumentation about individual slices of responsibility for the mess is not worthwhile, looking at the larger picture. And I do not dispute this part of Maximos' thesis.

Nevertheless, Maximos also seems to be pointing in a specific direction for any theoretical solution scenario: that ANY action to change the use of a piece of land is to be always COMPLETELY at the mercy of the decision of the community on that specific change. Thus, not only is the state to set up general guidelines for allowable pollution levels, and the county set up zoning ordinances, but if a farmer wants to change from growing potatoes to growing beans, he has to submit a request which details his methods and and an impact study. And the county Committee of the Everything You-Want-to-Do will decide. Same if a person wants to change from commuting to his nearby store job to a 30 miles farther away new job prospect - the Committee has to decide if that allocation of resources makes sense overall, before it can be allowed. If we cannot base our decision of whether a change is affordable (overall affordable, including sustainable) based on its cost in the marketplace, then the only alternative option is to rely on the "wisdom" of a committee.

"A subsistence farmer, almost by definition, does not depend on outside resources, and also does not depend on outside sales"

Subsistence farming doesn't necessarily mean that the farmer grows exactly what he needs, no more and no less. He may sell any surplus on the local market, he may barter a portion of his harvest for a crop that he doesn't grow, etc. Hence local markets can affect him.

"Also, if the problem in hungry countries is mainly a matter of distribution (read: despotic governments using imported food-control as a mechanism of people-control)"

Not necessarily. It may also be a matter of government ineptitude and/or basic inefficiency.

"the local farmers cannot sell as cheaply as the Western grown food is selling on their markets because the local non-insdustrial methods are more expensive"

Again, that's an oversimplification. It implies that the sole reason for the price difference is industrialism or lack thereof, when there's more to it than that, including farm policy here. Farmers here may be paid under contract to grow a certain crop for a low price per bushel, yet they "make up for it" in gross yield. The transnationals then sell the surplus to foreign countries at a rate lower than their own farmers can grow it, not just because of industrialization, but also because our own farmers are getting hosed in the process. Hence, agribusiness makes out at both ends of the deal, while the farmers lose out.

And that's just one scenario. There are others that are equally convoluted and complicated. One thing remains constant through all: increase in agribusiness profits.

Paul, I can see that. The intermix of government control forces with business interests has gotten so thoroughly muddled that there is no clear carving out what is caused by "markets" and what is caused by government involvement. So argumentation about individual slices of responsibility for the mess is not worthwhile, looking at the larger picture. And I do not dispute this part of Maximos' thesis.

Take a gander at this. That should send chills down your spine, as it shows how much of this is actually easily blamed on the courts not obeying the very law they are charged with enforcing!

Maximos, which portion of the world's population are you going to kill off to achieve this?

Tony, I like you and value your contribution to the discussion here, but if you're going to accuse me of genocide, I might just have to ban you.

There is considerable debate between proponents of various forms of agriculture as to whether this methodology or that is capable of sustaining the current global population, let alone the projected global population of 2050. I do not propose to resolve those questions here. But supposing that the Borlaugites are entirely correct, nothing will change with respect to the externalities of industrial agriculture; synthetic pesticides and fertilizers will still kill marine life and create dead zones; soils will still be depleted and eroded, concentrated feedlot operations will still accelerate the evolution of deadlier bacteria, industrial ag will still be dependent upon finite, non-renewable sources of energy, and so forth, and it is the sheerest form of magical thinking to suggest the contrary. No amount of scientific jiggering is going to make marine life tolerant of billions of gallons of water laced with nitrogen.

I don't really know whether ultimately we will give up industrial methods as a bad deal, but think that if we do, it will either be voluntarily because there is a replacement approach which provides as much food, or it will be as a failed civilization altogether.

That's probably a valid analysis of the situation. We'll ride industrial production straight down to ecological collapse, whether because of a want of an alternative, or for reason of the path dependencies and vested interests.

It appears that you are saying that one could knowingly take an irrational step to have another child, and commend oneself to God for the outcome.

One could have faith in Providence, which seems to me a superior option to adopting positions not consonant with scientific facts.

But it might also require government involvement in establishing a mechanism to force long-term costs (such as what erosion does to crop production or ocean effects) to appear on the balance sheet.

Precisely. Mechanisms to incorporate the costs of externalities into the up-front costs of various goods and services are imperative, if sustainable and ethical behaviours are to be incentivized. Food has a natural price, established finally by ecological capacities, and most of the attempts to drive down the price of food are, in reality, intergenerational "free lunch" fantasies. We can increase production now, at the cost of reduced soil fecundity later. We can drive down the price of meat, but at the cost of an increased incidence of various diseases down the road, as well as polluted watersheds. And so forth, and so on.

mucking it up with political glop

There is no fail-safe system of regulation or deregulation that can foreclose upon this possibility; it is an omnipresent potentiality of civilization.

The individual is generally incapable of making society-changing decisions and the damage from their actions is almost always easier to mitigate than ones done as official policy.

Which is precisely why these problems of resource management will be undertaken at the nation level, as well as the level of the global commodity markets, or not at all.

Did I miss where Maximos answered this question of Tony's?

If the externalities of suburbanization and its concomitants were incorporated into zoning regulations and pricing structures, the suburbs would represent a miniscule fraction of all residential properties, probably a fraction consistent with the projections of New Urbanist analysts. In this hypothetical world, if a homebuyer were one of the few able to afford suburban property, we could be reasonably certain that his acre was not an unsustainable indulgence. That's not actually-existing America, not by a longshot.

As regards industrial farming vs subsistence farming in the third world, the problem typically originates with the imposition of fees and/or taxes upon the locals, which exactions are to be paid in cash. A subsistence farmer, even one capable of feeding his family and producing a small surplus which can be traded, will seldom be able to make such payments; this compels the farmers to abandon their traditional methods and communities, in order to enter the cash nexus. They must then borrow, often at high rates of interest, in order to acquire seeds for crops marketable on the global commodity markets, often completely non-indigenous, to acquire the machinery and chemical/water inputs required by these crops, and, often enough, even to bring them to market. The combination of the high rates of interest, the expenses involved with industrial production, and the volatility of commodity prices frequently results in burgeoning debt loads and bankrupcies; in India, this process alone has resulted in a veritable epidemic of suicides among farmers. The process then accelerates as these commodity crops are released into the global markets, as, for a variety of reasons related to the commodity markets themselves, the quantity of foodstuffs produced, and subsidies, these crops typically undercut the prices of locally-produced foodstuffs, thus forcing a second cohort of farmers to submit to the cash nexus. In Mexico, this politico-economic process precipitated the seemingly relentless waves of immigration to El Norte.

I am not in principal opposed to that [government involvement in establishing a mechanism to force long-term costs (such as what erosion does to crop production or ocean effects) to appear on the balance sheet], but I cannot for the life of me think of an occasion where the government has done such a thing without mucking it up with political glop that makes the whole process questionable, to say the least. The sciences behind such future long-term cost projections are so far from solid that there can be no realistic common agreement on them, and without general agreement the imposition of government force cannot but appear as a taking of individual rights and liberties.

I think the skepticism about the science, often "science," that Tony mentions, behind the regulations that would in fact be imposed, and that apparently Maximos wants imposed, justifies something so close to an in-principal objection to that sort of meddling as to make no practical difference. I would _strongly_ oppose the government's (state or federal) putting some sort of "science czar" in charge of putting some sort of "environmental impact surcharge" on building outside of cities! I would oppose it pretty much to my dying breath. I think it's a crazy idea, and I think we can all be pretty sure that much if not all of what would be imposed would be based on nonsense, the environmentalist hysteria du jour. No thanks.

Which is precisely why these problems of resource management will be undertaken at the nation level, as well as the level of the global commodity markets, or not at all.

When left to the market, it still represents individual action only aggregated. The government can coerce it in one direction or another, which is likely given the way that we are becoming more authoritarian, but that doesn't make centralized resource management any wiser if done "conservatively" rather than according to Marxist principles. Centralized systems just don't scale well.

But hey, at least now we know what Maximos wants: Taxes on and disincentives to suburban living, placed by government, set by "information" from environmentalists, and set so high as to force most people to live crowded on top of each other in cities by cutting suburban populations to a "miniscule fraction of all residential properties." I suppose it's an advantage for him to have become less "apophatic" about his goals.

There is considerable debate between proponents of various forms of agriculture as to whether this methodology or that is capable of sustaining the current global population, let alone the projected global population of 2050. I do not propose to resolve those questions here. But supposing that the Borlaugites are entirely correct, nothing will change with respect to the externalities of industrial agriculture; synthetic pesticides and fertilizers will still kill marine life and create dead zones; soils will still be depleted and eroded, concentrated feedlot operations will still accelerate the evolution of deadlier bacteria, industrial ag will still be dependent upon finite, non-renewable sources of energy, and so forth, and it is the sheerest form of magical thinking to suggest the contrary. No amount of scientific jiggering is going to make marine life tolerant of billions of gallons of water laced with nitrogen.

And this will become all the more common as industrialized methods of agriculture become increasingly necessary to sustain the growing population. Your goals are contradictory, and I think you know that, which is why your argument to trust Providence in the avoidance of family planning smacks more of a "God of the gaps" argument between your two goals (limiting these negative issues and avoiding birth control/family planning) than a serious argument. The last time I saw this much squirming to reconcile two contradictory points was the last time I saw a Calvinist try to defend double predestination and accountability for sin.

There would be no centralized management of resources, no five-year plans, or anything else of that nature. There would merely be a legal and regulatory structure which, by accounting better for the externalities of various economic activities, would force their costs out into the open, thus incentivizing a different array of potential outcomes, much as our present system incentivizes the outcomes we actually have.

Taxes on and disincentives to suburban living...

Nature is not an infinitely deep reservoir of inexhaustible resources, such that the opportunity costs of using nature in some ways rather than others need never be reflected in the costs of those actualized options. This is merely a variant of the "tragedy of the commons" problem with which even libertarians have occupied their philosophically autistic selves. Though even many libertarians have no difficulty wrestling with these concepts, many other people do have difficulties, primarily because they have difficulty with the notion that a legal and economic system is artifactual, and superior to the degree that it accounts for all relevant factors.

There would be no centralized management of resources, no five-year plans, or anything else of that nature. There would merely be a legal and regulatory structure which, by accounting better for the externalities of various economic activities, would force their costs out into the open, thus incentivizing a different array of potential outcomes, much as our present system incentivizes the outcomes we actually have.

And who is going to create this legal and regulatory structure? Certainly not our native criminal class, whose qualifications for office are looking good in front of a camera and being more ruthless than the next guy.

Mike and Lydia are hitting the point I was leading to: if business interests are pretty much solidly (in effect, though calling them an "interest" merely collectivizes many individual actions) geared toward short-term gain at the expense of long-term good, then politically driven use of "science" is pretty much the same thing: geared toward short-term gain at the expense of long-term good. At the non-political bureaucratic level (to the extent a bureaucrat can operate free of the political master) there is instead at least some of the time the long-term personal gain at the expense of the public good (like the ole story of the Bureau of Indian Affairs lamenting that "his" indian has died). Though there are some public servants who do a better job.

The problem is sin, and it is found in all of us, not just businessmen or politicians or urbanites or farmers.

Mechanisms to incorporate the costs of externalities into the up-front costs of various goods and services are imperative, if sustainable and ethical behaviours are to be incentivized. Food has a natural price, established finally by ecological capacities, and most of the attempts to drive down the price of food are, in reality, intergenerational "free lunch" fantasies. We can increase production now, at the cost of reduced soil fecundity later. We can drive down the price of meat, but at the cost of an increased incidence of various diseases down the road, as well as polluted watersheds. And so forth, and so on.

To quote someone famous around here, the devil lieth in the details. I have long thought of the need for long term costs to be rightly reflected in the actual prices of things, not just in this context. While government is probably the natural first choice for this (by some people, that is), I would propose that we consider long and hard before we give that kind of power to government, at least across the board. I have tried to imagine what those mechanisms would look like, and I can't come up with a scenario that even begins to sound rational, effective, and not leading to direct despotism within 2 years. I think that we need to consider other alternatives than government as the primary agent of these mechanisms.

Here is a sample of what might be an alternative. One of the problems with being a conscientious shopper for basic necessities is that although we know that SOME retailers engage in shady business practices, in general we don't know who and how much, so we cannot make an educated decision (for example) to avoid A store that is cheaper but immoral versus B store that is more expensive but doesn't have - what, as bad a reputation as A? That's not information, that's guesswork.

So, what if we had an organization who offers a service to businesses: they do an "ethics" audit on the business, using a carefully stated charter of standards. The end result of the audit is a notice (plastered prominently on the door) that this company gets an A for treatment of employees (with sub-grades for salary, benefits, pension, and working conditions), a C for how they treat suppliers, a B for how they treat the community...

No government involved, but all of a sudden I have a gauge by which I can decide whether to give them my custom or not, that is actually based on information instead of guesswork.

So, if one of the standards used in the audit explicitly incorporates consideration of long-term footprint on natural resources as part of its measurements (used both to measure how one handles suppliers and effect on the community), then I can make business decisions that reflect that.

Maximos, think outside the box. I do not deny that there could be some need for government involvement at SOME level of setting forth how we make long-term impact part of the cost of doing business. But we should not jump right into making it the first and only agent of this change. For one thing, government could mop up details once the science is no longer in doubt and is fully established, which might mean AFTER most people have already realized it works that way - i.e. to lock into law an already established social consensus that most people are ready to obey.

Oh, did I mention that the politicians who üse" the science are often (though not always) singularly incapable of grasping the meaning and limits of the science they are using? I know that they misuse statistics more often that not, and most of the science that is involved in what we are talking about is expressed in terms of statistics. There's lies, damned lies, and statistics. Does that give one pause?

I doubt Maximos would be happy if there the majority of people turned out not to care tuppence about the environmental rating, either because they suspected its scientific objectivity and accuracy or because they were mean pave the planet types. Besides, it's a little difficult to extend the rating system to suburban house building. I suppose one could apply it to a newly built community or development: "Come buy a house in our community. It's got an A grade from the Environmental Ethics Board of Quality."

Mechanisms to incorporate the costs of externalities into the up-front costs of various goods and services are imperative, if sustainable and ethical behaviours are to be incentivized. Food has a natural price, established finally by ecological capacities, and most of the attempts to drive down the price of food are, in reality, intergenerational "free lunch" fantasies. We can increase production now, at the cost of reduced soil fecundity later. We can drive down the price of meat, but at the cost of an increased incidence of various diseases down the road, as well as polluted watersheds. And so forth, and so on.

Maximos would need a level of price information similar to what a central planner would need. Statements like mechanisms to incorporate the costs of externalities into the up-front costs of various goods and services are imperative just gloss over the fact that one must accurately measure those externalities, understand the relationships between them, and understand the behavior of those externalities.

It's easy to say "let's just factor X in," but someone has to actually FIGURE OUT X before it can be handled. Then, in order to be prudent, you have to verify their methods.

In actuality, there are so many variables that while we may kid ourselves that we understand it, we'll just end up looking like apes throwing darts at a wall as we plug in new values and hope for the best.

the creation of dead zones in the oceans owing to synthetic pesticide and fertilizer run-off,

You can guess whose factual claims I'm more inclined to trust. But aside from that, what again does this have to do with suburbia? If you squeeze a bunch more people into the cities by taxing suburban living practically out of existence, you know, they're still going to have to _eat_. How, again, is having people live in either cities or on little farms supposed to mean that we don't need pesticides and fertilizers in order to produce enough food that doesn't spoil to feed all those city folks? It seems to me, again, that this is less a claim coming originally from an anti-suburban argument than from an anti-people argument.

And guess where those people will be put? In buildings of increasing size. Welcome to the land of Maximos, where in 100 years, your descendants will be packed into skyscrapers like sardines where a 1300ft^2 condo will be upper-middle class living!

This thread should serve as a sharp rebuke to those of us gullible enough to think contemporary "conservatism" could be a vehicle for politcal reform and a guardian of unquantifiable human goods.

After all self-government is impossible given the omnipotence of our "native criminal class", the strangle-hold EarthFirst eco-terrorists have on local Zoning commisions and the insurmountable complexity of attempting sane and inspirational community development.

Troubled by a monochromatic landscape that has all the rich diversity of a May Day Parade in the old Soviet Union? Concerned about the economic impact remote franchises have on your local merchants and neighbors? Worried about the erosion of intermediary institutions and social bonds caused by long commutes and those same distant(both geographic and psychic)franchises? Nagged by the fear that your old hope Beauty Will Save the World was a delusion in face of merciless utilitarianism?

Don't be, Better to be a happy homo economicus than undertake the supposedly impossible task of making your little corner of the world lovable and thereby embarrass yourselves by "looking like apes throwing darts at a wall".

As for you Maximos, you have been exposed as a slumlord peddling 1300ft^2 condos to those you've cleverly trapped in urban squalor.

Maximos would need a level of price information similar to what a central planner would need. Statements like mechanisms to incorporate the costs of externalities into the up-front costs of various goods and services are imperative just gloss over the fact that one must accurately measure those externalities, understand the relationships between them, and understand the behavior of those externalities.

That's why I want to keep it out of the hands of "experts" and "government policy makers" if possible. After all, "experts" were responsible for the economic nonsense of the last 20 years. And the New Deal, which was just as threatening to real pricing of goods.

You can't get away from the defects of human nature by putting control in the hands of government, it's made of humans too. A successful solution (if one exists) must take into account human nature, both its good and bad sides. And collecting control into the government is bound to be detrimental in the long run, from what we know of human nature.

Nevertheless, Paul is right that we need to recognize that the "system" as we have it now is full to the brim with problems that won't go away by fixing on small slice at the expense of making another slice worse. We have to look at the whole structure while we make sure not to bulldoze the individuals that make up that structure. Tough job.

Look, this thread is just getting ridiculous when no one will call out Maximos for this statement:

"The combination of the high rates of interest, the expenses involved with industrial production, and the volatility of commodity prices frequently results in burgeoning debt loads and bankrupcies; in India, this process alone has resulted in a veritable epidemic of suicides among farmers."

This is just plain crazy-talk -- I dare you to post a link to your source for this "fact". I mean really, after all India has been through over the past 25-30 years -- India was a mess until she imported Borlung's technology and witnessed the Green Revolution. Now they can feed their people (same for China). Is India perfect? Was the U.S. perfect as we went from an agricultural society to one that experienced mass industrialization? Of course not. But there are positive externalities to industry as well as negative -- all this talk about "sustainability" and "accounting better for the externalities of various economic activities", needs to be based on data that Maximos and I (not to mention Lydia, Mike T. and Tony) won't agree on. Industrial agriculture produces pollution and I'm not going to deny it -- but like every other form of pollution, we can deal with it when we are rich and smart and have the technology to do more with less (need I remind you who lost the bet between Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich? need I remind you of the kind of world Paul Ehrlich was predicting we would live in in 2009 -- it doesn't look anything like the world we actually do live in). Guess what? Small farms and small communities produce pollution as well -- folks lived in squalor and fought off plagues in the Middle-Ages for a reason.

We can't begin to build a better "legal and regulatory structure" without good data, science, and a basic understanding of how markets work. To focus solely on Indian farmer suicides as the appropriate measure of how industrial agriculture has performed in India or China or even Mexico is perverse and strange (by the way, Mexicans started coming to the U.S. in large numbers when we...wait for it...started letting them in! Imagine that.) I suspect that Maximos is reading too much Naomi Klein and not enough George Gilder (or substitute your favorite smart libertarian economist...I'd also recommend Thomas Sowell).

Finally, Kevin comes along like a crazed Greek chorus to praise all of this nonsense; but again, if we can't agree on a basic description of reality, then what use is it to argue. Kevin looks at suburbia and sees "a monochromatic landscape that has all the rich diversity of a May Day Parade in the old Soviet Union." I look around me (northwest side of Chicago) and see diverse suburbs, some of which have quirky old downtowns, some of which don't; I see forest preserves and lakes and of course a good amount of concrete; I see all sorts of interesting cultural institutions -- some funded by the government, some funded by good old philanthropy; I see lots of cars but also lots of trains and buses; I see local merchants and lots of chains and I'm glad for the diversity and choice; I see thriving churches and local institutions and places that have no social capital (often in the inner city which has all sorts of dysfunction that has a lot to do with government programs to help the poor and not much to do with the market); etc. I live in a world that is just plain different from the world Kevin and Maximos live in and it is frustrating to listen to American conservatives who find nothing of worth (at least worthy of praise) in this world. I'm sure you'll both love Derbyshire's new book about conservative pessimism -- he wants to bring it back in vogue.

Of course, who am I to complain -- I keep forgetting the name of this wonderful website!

Kevin comes along like a crazed Greek chorus to praise all of this nonsense;

Come on Jeff, I have kept my points simple and based on my own lived personal experience to refute the contention that any attempts to
restrain the Mallification of America are an inevitable gateway to socialist tyranny.

I now live in a vibrant suburban community just outside my former home, the Greatest City in the World, NYC and participated in efforts to keep a cineplex from taking over our downtown movie theater, the construction of a multi-deck parking garage that did not conform to our colonial setting, the razing of a nature preserve for athletic fields and a McMansion craze so absurd it was featured in the NY Times. The first three preservation campaigns were successful and it is efforts like these that allow you to see; quirky old downtowns

In fact, you substantiate the case that developing and maintaining distinct local communities is quite doable without establishing a police state.

I live in a world that is just plain different from the world Kevin and Maximos live in and it is frustrating to listen to American conservatives who find nothing of worth (at least worthy of praise) in this world.

Wrong again, my friend. It is because I find (and I'm sure Maximos does too) so much worth preserving that I am calling for conservative to return to their natural instinct for conservation and to place the things that truly matter above short-term profits and comforts. This subtle insinuation about latent anti-Americanism has gone from mildly hurtful to wildly entertaining.

No one can deny the trends are towards homogenization (New Haven County meet Bucks County meet Cobb County, et al) and unsustainable life styles. But it is great we are having these discussions since it gives hope we are waking up in time to prevent the further destruction of goods that should remain safe from mindless commercialization.

...if business interests are pretty much solidly (in effect, though calling them an "interest" merely collectivizes many individual actions) geared toward short-term gain at the expense of long-term good, then politically driven use of "science" is pretty much the same thing: geared toward short-term gain at the expense of long-term good.

If we are incapable, either as individuals or as a society, which is to say - borrowing and paraphrasing one of Paul's formulations - a people organized for action in history, then perhaps we should simply adopt the credo of the decadent, "eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow, we die." Seriously. Sometimes I wonder whether conservatives truly believe that man is a rational animal, or, like modernists of all persuasions, that he is but a clever brute, whose most exalted ratiocinations are but cunning conceits veiling his passions. Somewhere along the line, the conservative and historical truth that civilization was the offspring of prudence, the patient, cultivated adaptation of tradition to circumstances, and thus embodied - among other things - an element of reason and deliberation, fell into utter desuetude, replaced by a variant of the modernist fantasy of the automatic cosmopolis, the idea that civilization and rightly ordered societies would form of themselves if only some or other 'mechanism' were left to operate. It may be, as a matter of contingent, historical fact, the case that no authorities in our society are capable of even a modicum of foresight; but original sin or no, this is not an a priori truth of human nature, as history may furnish examples of foresight and prudent anticipation of future events, notwithstanding the inadequacy of all our claims to knowledge.

I am willing to think outside of the box, as it were; but no form of organization wholly voluntaristic in its operations will ever suffice to reorient a society accustomed to wrongly ordered relations, both among its members and to the natural world, but must bear both the endorsement and sanction of authority.

Maximos would need a level of price information similar to what a central planner would need.

Umm, no. Competent scientists conversant with the processes required to, say, replenish depleted soils could develop working estimates of the costs of implementation, which could then be factored into prices on a per-acre basis, or something like that. This is not the same category of technocratic knowledge as the pretension of the Soviet planner to have knowledge of all of the consumer requirements and preferences of the Soviet subjects, which omniscience was then supposedly factored into the five-year plan. It's a cleanup estimate factored into present prices. It wouldn't be perfect, as nothing is, or can be, but it holds forth the possibility of being better than the magical thinking of, "Let's keep doing everything as we do it now, and something will just turn up!"

You can guess whose factual claims I'm more inclined to trust.

Of course. I just make stuff up because I'm a fulminating ideologue, indulging in periodic fits of socialistic misanthropic euphoria, dreaming the end of all good capitalist things, and the immiseration of man. Yeah, that's it.

The dead zone is caused by nutrient enrichment from the Mississippi River, particularly nitrogen and phosphorous. Watersheds within the Mississippi River Basin drain much of the United States, from Montana to Pennsylvania and extending southward along the Mississippi River. Most of the nitrogen input comes from major farming states in the Mississippi River Valley, including Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, Missouri, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Nitrogen and phosphorous enter the river through upstream runoff of fertilizers, soil erosion, animal wastes, and sewage. In a natural system, these nutrients aren't significant factors in algae growth because they are depleted in the soil by plants. However, with anthropogenically increased nitrogen and phosphorus input, algae growth is no longer limited. Consequently, algal blooms develop, the food chain is altered, and dissolved oxygen in the area is depleted. The size of the dead zone fluctuates seasonally, as it is exacerbated by farming practices. It is also affected by weather events such as flooding (more info) and hurricanes.

In his In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan pretty much debunked the tenets of what he called “nutritionism”—the idea that human nutrition could be reduced to a set of macronutrients (vitamin A, the B vitamins, etc.), which could then be isolated and fed to be people to keep them healthy. Scientists have known for a while that a given dose of, say, isolated vitamin A in pill form (or added to bread as fortification) does not provide anything close to the same benefit as an equal dose in the context of a carrot. You can’t live well on 2,500 calories from sugar water plus oat fiber and a One a Day vitamin. Scientists now know that, but haven’t quite figured out why. Human nutrition turns out to be more mysterious than people in white lab coats have so far been able to decipher.

For about 100 years now, a form of nutritionism has also held sway among soil scientists, too. Where human nutritionists focused on vitamin A, etc., soil scientists seized upon N, P, and K—nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium. No one disputes that these are basic building blocks of plant life—without sufficient access to each of them, plants can’t flourish. But just as human nutritionists at one time thought that nutrition could be isolated into macronutrients and delivered to people out of the context of food, so plant scientists decided that N, P, and K were sufficient, in isolated form, for plant life.

This idea marked the rise of what become known as NPK thinking—the nutritionism of soil scientists. By learning to synthesize nitrogen and mine phosphorous and potassium, technologists sparked an agricultural revolution. Farmers could abandon the time-consuming task of recycling nutrients and building soil; instead, they could merely purchase newly available inputs (on the installment plan, of course). Society had “solved” the whole vexing problem of soil fertility; farmers could now focus on growing food, and lots of it (meaning fewer farmers).

In the NPK-think that still rules conventional agriculture, soil is essentially an inert medium for conveying isolated blasts of synthesized and mined NPK to crops. The effect on soil quality has been dreadful. Writing in The Fatal Harvest Reader (2002), the California farmer Jason McKenney describes the effect:

We now know that massive use of synthetic fertilizers to create artificial fertility has had a cascade of adverse effects on natural soil fertility and the entire soil system. Fertilizer application begins the destruction of soil biodiversity by diminishing the role of nitrogen-fixing bacteria and amplifying the role of everything that feeds on nitrogen. These feeders then speed up the decomposition of organic matter and humus. As organic matter decreases, the physical structure of soil changes. With less pore space and less of their sponge-like qualities, soils are less efficient at storing water and air. More irrigation is needed. Water leeches through soils, draining away nutrients that no longer have an effective susbstrate on which to cling. With less available oxygen the growth of soil microbiology slows, and the intricate ecosystem of biological exchanges breaks down.

You can't get away from the defects of human nature by putting control in the hands of government, it's made of humans too.

Neither can one escape the defects of human nature by playing the Three Monkeys and chanting, "Markets! Markets! Markets!". The defects of human nature manifest themselves in all spheres of human endeavour, which is why it is imperative to have both people interested in preventing government from arrogating to itself and excess of authority, and others interested in checking the excesses of the capitalists. There is not question of perfection, but at least it improves one's odds.

This is just plain crazy-talk...

Yeah, I made that one up, too. Just another bout of puritanical socialistic misanthropic euphoria.

I'm on the verge of closing this section to further comments, as I am not obligated to provide a forum for eisegesis, insinuations, and insults.

I did make a specific point beyond questioning the empirical claims: If you were right about every one of your empirical claims, there would still be the question of how this has more to do with people living in suburbia than it has to do with people, full stop. People who need to eat. You produce less food, you have less food. If these processes for producing more food are as bad as you claim they are and must be stopped, then all those people living in the cities where, presumably, you want them to be made (somehow) to live will have to pay a lot more for their food, which will now be produced less efficiently because more slowly, painfully, and on a much smaller scale. This might be a problem. And furthermore, the processes in question are supposed to be for and from humans, not humans specifically living in suburbia. Which means that the argument you are making about the environment should be admitted to be an argument about the badness of humans for the environment, not specifically about the badness of suburbs for the environment.

So, if the presumed default implications of empirical science are politically unpalatable, those empirics magically change? I'm at something of a loss as to your objective here, unless it's to equate opposition to suburbia, via a sort of genealogical unmasking, with sheer misanthropy.

No, the significance of the suburbs is that, in their absence, there would be that much more land in cultivation, not necessarily enough to solve all of the aforementioned problems; but that would at least be something better than Micawberism.

I am not obligated to provide a forum for eisegesis, insinuations, and insults.

Your case, Maximos suffers from the sheer immensity of its scope, richness in detail and an overstated indictment of suburbia, as well as the understandable vulnerabilities of your audience. At this particularly tumultuous moment in our nation's history, even the mere mention of child labor laws causes profuse sweating and numbness in their extremities. In time, they will realize the path they brazenly chose was the true road to serfdom, and will join the resistance as best as their gray jump-suited servitude will allow. Until then, a flak jacket is recommended.

Go Jeff Singer. (I'll be the crazed Greek chorus on this side. )

Lydia you can't go from Choir Director to inconspicuously standing behind the sopranos and their ostentatious Whigs. Not now.

"It is because I find (and I'm sure Maximos does too) so much worth preserving that I am calling for conservatives to return to their natural instinct for conservation and to place the things that truly matter above short-term profits and comforts. This subtle insinuation about latent anti-Americanism has gone from mildly hurtful to wildly entertaining."

Hear, hear!

Jeff Singer suggests that Max needs to read more George Gilder and Thos. Sowell. Seems to me that Mr. Singer has imbibed a bit too much libertarian thought and should perhaps in turn put Gilder and Sowell down and pick up Roepke and W. Berry instead.

**Neither can one escape the defects of human nature by playing the Three Monkeys and chanting, "Markets! Markets! Markets!". The defects of human nature manifest themselves in all spheres of human endeavour, which is why it is imperative to have both people interested in preventing government from arrogating to itself and excess of authority, and others interested in checking the excesses of the capitalists.**

True, but this imperative requires a belief that there are such things as "excesses of the capitalists"! A fair portion of American conservatives do not, unfortunately, and it is from that contingent that the objections to conservation and sustainability originate. Still, any number of conservatives have managed to roll these two critiques, the one of excessive government, the other of overreaching capitalism, into one larger meta-critique, if I may call it that. True conservatives should be equally suspicious of the arrogation of power by government and by business interests. And we should be especially wary when the two collude, as such collusion will never be a good thing for the average citizen.

You provided a link to a PowerPoint presentation that was obviously intended to persuade an audience of a particular viewpoint. This presentation did not attempt to place farming changes in a broader context (e.g. suicides are up X% from 1960, or back in 1960 X% the population was STARVING on a regular basis because agriculture was so primative and couldn't keep up with the growing population vs. today when India can feed its people, etc.)

I mean, where do you find this stuff? Again, you present yourself as the honest, rational conservative who is just analyzing the obvious science and attempting to correct the capitialist ideologues, but that is not what you are doing. You are marshalling particular facts, divorced from context, and making your case on the basis of those facts. For example, while I agree dead zones are real and a problem you conveniently fail to tell all your readers that they are reversible. We can use industrial technology to correct the problems of industrial technology! Amazing how that works.

You assume that once conservatives are presented with the "facts" of capitalisms excess, we will obviously agree with you. I don't deny capitalism has excess (it is a human activity after all) but when we can't agree on the "facts" (usually because you want to focus on fact X when I say facts Y, Z, and maybe even A, B, and C are relevant to the discussion) we won't be able to agree on solutions. I suggest (not that you'll take my advice) that if you want to persuade anyone beyond a couple of Wendell Barry fans of your position you need to focus your arguments on the broader context in which they take place.

Rob G, due to you, I just began a book, The Luminous Dusk, which I would otherwise never have heard of and read. You sir, our the Editor of the Books section our people sorely need. Thanks for your recommendations.

Jeff, dead zones are reversible, if discharges of nitrogen are reduced. Are you now arguing for a clampdown on industrial ag?*

Moreover, are are arguing that Indian farmers are not committing suicide in significant numbers, numbers large enough to warrant international notice, or are you arguing that this rate of suicide in inconsequential, that some eggs must be broken in order to make the omelet of increased agricultural production? In other words, are you arguing that facts are not facts, or that a little human sacrifice to the economic gods is OK, if those gods deliver in the end?

And don't talk to me about the possibility of adding aluminum sulfate to the affected waters, to compensate for the effects of the nitrogen, as the use of the chemical compound on such a scale would lead, in a short while, to increases in aluminum uptake by everyone coming into contact with those waters, directly or indirectly, such as through consumption of marine creatures. Aluminum, in quantities larger than trace amounts, is a toxic heavy metal in the body.

Umm, no. Competent scientists conversant with the processes required to, say, replenish depleted soils could develop working estimates of the costs of implementation, which could then be factored into prices on a per-acre basis, or something like that. This is not the same category of technocratic knowledge as the pretension of the Soviet planner to have knowledge of all of the consumer requirements and preferences of the Soviet subjects, which omniscience was then supposedly factored into the five-year plan. It's a cleanup estimate factored into present prices. It wouldn't be perfect, as nothing is, or can be, but it holds forth the possibility of being better than the magical thinking of, "Let's keep doing everything as we do it now, and something will just turn up!"

Where is the evidence that American farmers are engaged in widespread practices which lead to soil depletion? The processes you describe are already known, and to my knowledge, generally in heavy use by private farmers acting out of rational self-interest. Even our paper manufacturers have taken to sustainable practices with regard to harvesting trees.

Of course, this is a single point, and I know you're not limiting yourself to minor points like this. Rather, what you want is a comprehensive reevaluation of the entire economic system, with self-described "experts" gauging every angle of every transaction for ethical, sustainable behavior.

Taken on the aggregate that is going to look functionally identical to the proposals of the progressives.

No, the significance of the suburbs is that, in their absence, there would be that much more land in cultivation, not necessarily enough to solve all of the aforementioned problems; but that would at least be something better than Micawberism.

In their absence there would also be less land for families to live on, and coupled with virtually unconstrained fertility (even in marriage) that would combine to create horribly cramped conditions in the urban environments. As I said, when you cannot build out, you have to build up.

On the other hand, the midwest produces enough crops to not only feed the entire US population, but to export abroad. That doesn't exactly sound like a sustainability problem that couldn't be mitigated by a change in tax and monetary policies.

Moreover, are are arguing that Indian farmers are not committing suicide in significant numbers, numbers large enough to warrant international notice, or are you arguing that this rate of suicide in inconsequential, that some eggs must be broken in order to make the omelet of increased agricultural production? In other words, are you arguing that facts are not facts, or that a little human sacrifice to the economic gods is OK, if those gods deliver in the end?

A friend of mine told me that in the last several years, India has made major strides in improving their transportation infrastructure. They've actually got some American-style highways connecting their states now. As the farmers' economic problems are mainly ones of distribution, not production, the obvious choice is to move money away from social welfare spending to infrastructure connecting rural India to urban India and India's ports.

We now know that massive use of synthetic fertilizers to create artificial fertility has had a cascade of adverse effects on natural soil fertility and the entire soil system. Fertilizer application begins the destruction of soil biodiversity by diminishing the role of nitrogen-fixing bacteria and amplifying the role of everything that feeds on nitrogen. These feeders then speed up the decomposition of organic matter and humus. As organic matter decreases, the physical structure of soil changes. With less pore space and less of their sponge-like qualities, soils are less efficient at storing water and air. More irrigation is needed. Water leeches through soils, draining away nutrients that no longer have an effective susbstrate on which to cling. With less available oxygen the growth of soil microbiology slows, and the intricate ecosystem of biological exchanges breaks down.

Perhaps this paragraph, quoted in a comment above, was missed? As it happens, it is a scientifically-accurate description of what happens to soils subjected to years of NPK shock treatments, as per industrial ag; it came, moreover as the conclusion to a broader discussion of why the NPK "nutritionism" focus on discrete nutrients is flawed.

Taken on the aggregate...

First, none of this would mandate "taking on every angle of every transaction". It would require establishing a rough and adjustable framework setting prices for various externalities and long-term costs, a task no different, fundamentally, from the construction of an economic order incentivizing the maximization of rational, material self-interest, in the teeth of traditional property arrangements. Second, externalities do not cease to be externalities merely because only progressives may be interested in the problems.

In their absence...

Reference to the quantitative difficulties arising from any retreat from industrial ag does not alter the long-term unsustainability of the enterprise, which is what it is, particularly when considered in relation to the fossil-fuel derived inputs, which are finite.

As the farmers' economic problems are mainly ones of distribution...

The principal problem for the farmers is debt related to the production of commodity crops, hence the introduction of various rural employment programmes, intended provide additional income to rural communities. Addressing distribution questions is only a partial solution.

You're welcome, Kevin. As a guy who'd like to go to grad school, but hasn't really had the time or the money to do so, I try to make up for it by lots of independent reading.

"Where is the evidence that American farmers are engaged in widespread practices which lead to soil depletion?"

Among other places see Gary Holthaus's book "From the Farm to the Table," where this subject is discussed and documentation provided. Evidence also can be found in any number of 'New Agrarian' sources. Big Agri often forces farmers who contract with them to monocrop and to use the chemical fertilizers and pesticides they recommend. Monocropping and unabated use of chemical (as opposed to organic) fertilizers are recipes for soil depletion, and like petroleum, soil is an unrenewable resource.

Your case, Maximos suffers from the sheer immensity of its scope, richness in detail and an overstated indictment of suburbia, as well as the understandable vulnerabilities of your audience.

Yep. Who cares how many bodies of water are polluted, or how much soil is eroded and turned into an inert medium for chemical nutrients, or how farmers have become cogs in the machine of agribusiness? As long as there is increasing supply, everything else will sort itself out.

"Only after the last tree has been cut down.
Only after the last river has been poisoned.
Only after the last fish has been caught.
Only then will you find that money cannot be eaten."
- Cree Indian Prophecy

First, none of this would mandate "taking on every angle of every transaction". It would require establishing a rough and adjustable framework setting prices for various externalities and long-term costs, a task no different, fundamentally, from the construction of an economic order incentivizing the maximization of rational, material self-interest, in the teeth of traditional property arrangements. Second, externalities do not cease to be externalities merely because only progressives may be interested in the problems.

At the very least, it will require a massive expansion of administrative law as it will be administrative agencies who will be handling all of this. If you honestly expect Congress to get into the nitty gritty details then you are off in la la land. The history of administrative agencies is a very troubled one as well.

And of course externalities do not cease to be what they are based on who is interested in them. However, most of the externalities have intricate relationships with one another and accurately understanding them is extremely complicated. I am extremely skeptical about the efficacy of getting "experts" involved in the economic processes to the degree of adding a VAT-like tax based on their perception of these externalities and the speed with which government operates in a centralized fashion is an order of magnitude slower than the speed with which society operates.

The easiest solution would be to first examine our tax, monetary and subsidization policies. We subsidize agriculture, and most of those subsidies go to agribusiness. It is far more likely that ending them would cripple the power of agribusiness over agriculture and small farmers than hurt family farms in the long run.

Monocropping and unabated use of chemical (as opposed to organic) fertilizers are recipes for soil depletion, and like petroleum, soil is an unrenewable resource.

Well, I'd add one qualification to this judgment: soil can be renewable, under certain circumstances, such as the many millenia of inactivity which allowed the Black Earth belt, stretching from the Ukraine into Southern Russia, to form. Many thousands of years of vegetation growing, seeding, decomposing, and soils in some regions can be replenished. In others, such as that region of Australia mentioned previously, soils are simply finished; the area is savanna or desert now, thanks to short-term rational self-interest run amok.

I find it difficult to pin you down. Seriously. First you say there is a "veritable epidemic of suicides among farmers". I then ask for a source and you provide me now with two separate sources which suggest there are in fact Indian suicides but do not provide any context or background on whether this problem has grown, has waxed and waned, or has only become a problem with the introduction of industrial agriculture and the problem of debt (one wonders, however, why such debt doesn't lead to an "epidemic of suicides" here in the U.S. -- after all, we have lots more debt than Indian farmers). So no, I'm not "arguing that Indian farmers are not committing suicide in significant numbers, numbers large enough to warrant international notice", but note how your language changes (from "veritable epidemic" to "significant numbers"). But is getting rid of industrial agriculture the only solution to the problem? It seems to me you also refuse to acknowledge that there might be different solutions to address this problem -- for example, better bankruptcy laws that won't force farmers to lose all they have if they default on a loan. You also refuse to engage with the context of why industrial agriculture was introduced into India -- their people were starving or malnourished for hundreds of years and now they are not. This is not a question of "breaking a few eggs" -- the eggs were broken for many, many years and along comes the Green Revolution and suddenly millions (this is no exaggeration) live healthier and wealthier lives.

Likewise with all forms of pollution -- I'm all for pricing externalities, but as Mike T. says the devil is in the details. Take acid rain. When folks realized it was a problem we didn't pass a law to ban industrial factories. We said those factories needed to install scrubbers on their smoke-stacks and lo and behold, acid rain is not a problem anymore. Likewise with industrial agriculture -- you assume the only solution is to stop using nitrates. I say why not treat the polluted water before it goes into the ocean? And who is to say we won't come up with other technological fixes? Again, you like to point to the supposed unsustainability of fossil fuels -- I point you again to Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich. Market forces (i.e. good price signals) drive innovation and improvement and we just don't know with any degree of certainty what the future of our fossil fuel economy will be because we don't know how much better we'll get at using fossil fuels, finding fossil fuels and yes, developing alternatives. And finally, who knows what technology might be able to do for soil in a hundred years -- we are already growing food using just water, so why not artificial soil? You underestimate man's ingenuity.

Your refusal to acknowledge this reality is frustrating, so I apologize for questioning your sanity earlier, but when you insist on only pointing to flaws in our modern economy without acknowledging its intristic goods, it is difficult to come to any common ground.

Maximos would need a level of price information similar to what a central planner would need.

Yes, that's the common thread I see in everything Maximos is calling for. While he will deny it up and down, it all sounds very much like a central planner's job description.

"Local governments" aren't going to develop "mechanisms to incorporate the costs of externalities into the up-front costs of various goods and services" and if they did, each local government would come up with different mechanisms and different externalities which would contradict the findings of the other local governments.

"Local governments" aren't going to intentionally herd their populations into the cramped cities of other local governments. Generally, local governments want to keep their populations. And individuals aren't going to herd themselves either, since quite a good number of people consider cramped city living to a be a sort of hell.

The only plausible way that any of Maximos's aims could be accomplished is if you had an army of pointy-headed federal bureaucrats controlling every aspect of people's lives based on their government-approved "moral" and "scientific" considerations. The assumption, of course, is that these bureaucrats are just somehow wiser and more moral than the rest of us peons, so they can make our decisions for us more competently than we could. How this is different from the totalitarian schemes of every other progressive in history, I don't know.

Perhaps Maximos is banking on the maturation of human cloning, so that the army of bureaucrats can be an army of Maximoses. Then we'd have that "wiser and more moral than the rest of us" problem licked, and their judgements of the "externalities" necessary to create a "sustainable" regulatory structure would be 100% correct all of the time!

But, I'm being really unfair here, I know. Maximos isn't really calling for central planners to herd everyone into cities and impose an all-encompassing "sustainable" regulatory structure on them. He's just calling for "we" to do it, where "we" refers to anyone and everyone (including central planners).

I'm sorry, but there are only two ways to read this stuff. It's either an implied call for totalitarianism or a pointless rant over the fact that everybody doesn't just think like Maximos.

The Wikipedia entry for farmers' suicides in India notes that the epidemic had its origins in the 1990s; that entry also mentions that P. Sainath was one of the first to report on the problem. Sainath, one of the reporters with the most extensive knowledge of rural conditions in India, also writes:

What do the farm suicides have in common? Those who have taken their lives were deep in debt – peasant households in debt doubled in the first decade of the neoliberal “economic reforms,” from 26 per cent of farm households to 48.6 per cent. We know that from National Sample Survey data. But in the worst states, the percentage of such households is far higher. For instance, 82 per cent of all farm households in Andhra Pradesh were in debt by 2001-02. Those who killed themselves were overwhelmingly cash crop farmers – growers of cotton, coffee, sugarcane, groundnut, pepper, vanilla. (Suicides are fewer among food crop farmers – that is, growers of rice, wheat, maize, pulses.) The brave new world philosophy mandated countless millions of Third World farmers forced to move from food crop cultivation to cash crop (the mantra of “export-led growth”). For millions of subsistence farmers in India, this meant much higher cultivation costs, far greater loans, much higher debt, and being locked into the volatility of global commodity prices. That’s a sector dominated by a handful of multinational corporations. The extent to which the switch to cash crops impacts on the farmer can be seen in this: it used to cost Rs.8,000 ?($165 today) roughly to grow an acre of paddy in Kerala. When many switched to vanilla, the cost per acre was (in 2003-04) almost Rs.150,000 ($3,000) an acre. (The dollar equals about 50 rupees.)

So, yes, industrial, commodity-crop oriented agriculture had much to do with the upsurge in suicides among Indian farmers.

the eggs were broken for many, many years

Have I ever gainsaid as much? What I question is the false antinomy which holds that either this group of people suffer or that group of people suffer.

I say why not treat the polluted water before it goes into the ocean?

A fine idea, save for the fact that no one really has a proposal to do this; the only options on the table are reducing the usage of nitrates or dumping vast quantities of an aluminum compound into the water, with the foreseeable consequence of causing an increased incidence of heavy metal poisoning.

And who is to say we won't come up with other technological fixes?

And who is to say that we will? We cannot know with any degree of certainty that we will be able to devise technological solutions to these problems, or to develop alternatives to the mass usage of fossil fuels that do not themselves run into scarcity problems themselves, and have their own externality problems. This debate would be much, much more transparent, in all respects, if it could be admitted that it is a debate between those who want to undertake a prudential calculation based upon presently understood trends, and those who have a faith, based upon past performance, that technological expertise will cause something or other to turn up. At some point in time, the Humean objections will obtain, however; past performance will not be an indicator of future viability.

And finally, who knows what technology might be able to do for soil in a hundred years -- we are already growing food using just water, so why not artificial soil? You underestimate man's ingenuity.

See the commentary I've excerpted above regarding the myths of nutritionism, the idea that growing food is a matter of injecting a few nutrients into an inert medium. Fecund soils, or other mediums, are complex ecosystems, and not engineering projects.

I note, finally, the supreme irony that I am reproached, from the one side, for believing it possible for society, through its authoritative institutions, to dis-incentivize certain practices, and to incentivize others, a process that is of the essence of any form of social organization, adapting prudentially and pragmatically as new information becomes available, while, from the other, I am reproached for a paucity of faith in human ingenuity. Is my confidence in human rationality misplaced, or is it impoverished? It seems altogether more modest to have a tempered confidence in the ability of reasonable men to adapt, prudentially and piecemeal, to circumstances already partially known, than to have faith in the ability of a narrow subset of men, scientists, to devise unforeseeable solutions to both known problems and unforeseeable problems.

Yes, that's right, Deuce: we cannot possibly impose some sort of economic disincentive on practices we know to create significant externalities, and deal ad hoc with any potential adverse consequences of such a measure, allowing people to shape their lives and fortunes within the new parameters, just as they do within the present system; but we can have an indeterminate faith in the ability of another class of "enlightened" people called scientists to just turn something up, somehow, someday, so that we never need reflect upon the conditions of possibility of our way of life. We either have this secular faith, or we're communists. Oooooookay, then.

I've decided to close comments on this thread, owing to the perhaps predictable descent into dust and shadow, along with accusations of closeted Bolshevism, now taking tentative steps into the light. Tedious and productive of more heat than light.